This year in Vegas I got sick. The worst that I’ve ever been sick in Vegas. It wasn’t the typical Vegas flu that a lot of us who’ve been there for AEE have come to expect. It was some weird virus thing that made my throat so raw that when I coughed, my throat actually started bleeding on the inside.
So when I say that on the day after the convention, Janaury 12 (which just happened to be my birthday), I was thrilled to be doing nothing other than sleeping in the passenger seat of my Lexus RX 350 while John drove us home from Vegas, I’m being completely serious. I stayed awake for a little bit, and John and I were just talking about the convention and the upcoming week, and then about the time we got to Baker, I feel asleep. I woke back up around the outlet mall at Barstow, and shortly after that, a driver in a lane right of us was yelling at us to pull over. I was kind of drowsy and told John, and I motioned to the guy that we’d pull over at an exit. He was really persistent, so rolled down my window, and he yelled that my car was smoking. So John and I got off right away, and we saw that our car had a pretty bad oil leak. Since we were pretty much in the middle of the desert, but an exit was about 4 miles up, we decided to drive that far.
When we got to a service station, they had to call the mechanic in. About 20 minutes later, the mechanic got there and told us that he couldn’t fix the leak. So I called Lexus and they said they’d come get the car (yay!) and tow it to the “local dealership” (shit – what does that mean?). We were about 5 miles north of Victorville on the 15 freeway. Luckily, it turned out that the closest Lexus dealership to there was in Ontario, CA, which was about 40 minutes closer home.
While waiting for the tow truck, Tracy and Geoff from the EA internet department stopped in to visit us, and Tracy took these pics with his iPhone.
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- On phone with Lexus
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- Unpacking my car to make it easier later in the day.
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- Always on the phone.
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- Tracy and Geoff show up in Tracy’s spiffy Scion
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- The only building other than the gas station at this exit. Other than that, just desert.
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- Transferring it to Tracy’s car.
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- Putting our personal bags back in my car after we realized we wanted to take them home with us and could transfer them to the loaner car.
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- Oil leaked from my car.
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- More oil. :(
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- The tow truck finally came.
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- Relieved to be on our way again.
Lexus still has my car, and I’m driving a nice loaner car until they get mine fixed. Turns out the part that broke on my car was a recall item. The engine oil line on my make and model was known to have problems, but I was never notified of a recall. Ugh…
I guess overall, I’m really thankful for the guy who made sure we got off the road, and that my engine didn’t blow.
-Karen
