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Not the trip I had planned
May. 9th, 2018 10:57 amWhen I set out from Luleå on Saturday the plan was to head first to the home of Linda and Rikard to give them a bag of Norrskensfest lost and found to take to Double Wars and return to the owner, then head to Hjalmar’s, stay the night, and head to Trondhiem with him the next day, where we would spend the week in the workshop learning to carve Viking Age cooking vessels. It was a good plan.
Pretty before I had even gotten fully out of Luleå the car suddenly started shaking a bit. It did this right around the same time that I passed from one colour/texture of asphalt to another, so I wasn’t clear if the shaking was the car, or the road, so I called David. He suggested pulling over and checking to see if the wheels had been tightened properly after the break work that had just been done. I checked first the right front tire and noticed that there was a fair bit of hot air coming off of the car by that tire, but didn’t notice if it was from the engine or the tire, and even commented something about it being warm to David, with whom I was still talking. Then I went on to the other tires but didn’t really notice at that that they were not also warm.
The tire bolts not being loose I got back into the car and started driving again, this time not noticing any shaking, but I did notice that it wasn’t handling normally—getting up to speed required way more gas pressure than normal. However, it was a weekend and there wasn’t anything I could do about it just then, and once it got up to speed and cruise control was set it returned to normal behaviour.
The first part of the plan went well. I arrived at L&R’s place and got the tour (they recently bought a couple of old houses out in the country near Umeå. They fixed up the smaller to live in now, and they plan to fix up the larger to be their main home, but the plans for that one are a bit more ambitious, so it is good that the smaller house was mostly useable from the beginning.
After visiting briefly with them I was feeling kinda tried and not up for joining Hjalmar at his friend’s birthday party, so instead I called Linda and Markus, who live in the same apartment complex as Hjalmar, and invited myself over. She was delighted to hear from me, and we spent an hour or two cuddling and catching up before I did my yoga and went to sleep on her couch.
Bright and early the next morning I went over to Hjalmar’s and we did the last of his packing and hit the road. An hour or so later, after a short break in driving the car, which had behaved fine for all of the rest of the driving the day before, started shaking again. So we pulled over, and looked at the tires again, and this time Hjalmar noticed that the metal part of the right front tire was really hot (as in don’t touch it), but none of the other four were. He called his friend Ingemar for advice, and I called David and consulted him. Ingemar said that it could be that the break is engaging, but not retracting again after engaging, and thus keeps rubbing against the break pad as we drive, which would cause thing to heat up. He said that one can manually pry it up and then avoid breaking again.
We tried this, and the car didn’t shake when we next drove. However, even if one doesn’t want to use the breaks, sooner or later one must (especially as by this time we had left the E4 (major N-S highway in Sweden) and were one a minor highway heading inland, which means more frequent villages for which there is at least reduced speed limits, and sometimes it was necessary to turn from one highway or the other.
We stopped and checked now and then. On one occasion when I was driving the car never shook, and when we checked the tire temperature it wasn’t at all warm. Then Hjalmar took over and it started shaking again, and the tire got hot. We managed to limp it along till the town of Sollefteå, where Åsa, one of our SCA friends lives, by which point it was having issues every time we tried to drive it.
So, we called Åsa, and she said come on over. When we arrived, we told them the problem, and wondered if they could recommend a car repair shop who could have a look. At which point Jonny, her husband, promptly grabbed his coveralls, and car jack, and took the tire off (it was so hot it was smoking). He cleaned up the breaks, lubricated them, saw that things were retracting, and then put it all back together and we tested it, saw that the breaks worked, and, after visiting a bit longer we set back out. However, soon thereafter it started shaking again, and when we stopped and checked, the tire was once again really hot, so back to Åsa’s we went.
It being a Sunday evening no shops were open, so she made up the guest bed for us and we had a pleasant visit before going to sleep kinda early. I woke up at 02:00 that morning thinking of the fact that I still needed to compile a list of shops to call, so I got up and, with Google’s help, filled in a spreadsheet of numbers and opening times etc. Then I went back to bed, setting an alarm for 6:45 (since the earliest opening time was 07:00).
At 07:15 I woke again, and realized that I hadn’t heard the alarm, so I got up and begun calling. The first several places I called had no time available in the next two weeks, but the next agreed to have a look today. So Åsa led me there in her car, and we transferred the stuff to her car and returned to the house to wait. (Where I took a nap!)
That afternoon the shop called to say that they could fix it, but needed to order a part, which wouldn’t be there till Tuesday morning, and it would cost 9,000 SEK to fix. I wasn’t happy to hear this, especially as I was supposed to have already been in Trondheim, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I called David, and he called the shop and spoke to them to get better details about the work and the need for it than I could get with my not so good Swedish, and then he called to tell me that he had suggested they do yet one more important task while they were at it, which would add yet another 1,000 SEK to the price.
Since we had the day available Åsa took us out for a bit of sight-seeing. First, we went up the hill to get the overview of the area (how nice it was to have a decent sized hill to go up; I really miss topography living in Luleå). Then we went into town to go to the museum, but it was Monday, and museums in Sweden (and, I think, all of Europe) are closed on Mondays. So she called her friend who works at the museum, who was about to be heading past the museum anyway, so she joined us for a quick 20 minute chat about interesting things to see in the area. At her suggestion (and to the delight of both Hjalmar and I) the next stop was some Iron-Age burial mounds, which are located not too far south of town along the river bank.
On the way home we stopped by the store and picked up stuff to do some baking. We made one apple cake for Åsa and Jonny as a thank you for being so kind to host us and take us on adventures etc., and a dairy-free, gluten free apple and sugared ginger pie (almond and millet with coconut crust) that Hjalmar could eat. (I tried both the next day after breakfast and can report that both are yummy.)
When we went to bed Monday night the plan was to sleep in (since the car part wouldn’t arrive till the afternoon anyway), and, when the car was ready that afternoon, we could head on to Trondheim (six more hours driving time, under normal conditions), where we could at least work in the shop on Wednesday before it closed for the holiday on Thursday. However, late Tuesday morning the shop contacted me to say that the part had arrived, but was the wrong size, and that the new part they had ordered wouldn’t be here till Wednesday afternoon.
We sighed at the additional delay, sent messages to everyone who needed to know (the workshop, the Airbnb, David), and then hopped in Åsa’s car to go a bit further from town to see some stone-age rock carvings along the bank of the river. That was a very delightful stop. The river is running quite high just now, with all of the snow melt, so the interaction of the river and rocks would have been reason enough to be there, but the many rock carvings (which have been painted over in red to make them more visible) were also interesting. These carvings were done by a people who hunted moose, and many hundreds of the carvings are of moose.
After playing a while at the river side looking at the rock (a lovely gneissic rock, with lots of folding, and one (that we saw) 20 to 30 cm wide diabase dike cutting through it) and the paintings and the examples of stone age style fish traps, and much more recent example of a water driven mill house, we went back up the hill (Hjalmar and I choosing to go up the steep steps that went half way up the hill to the road, and then stopped, just were the slope gets even steeper, to be replaced by a rope on poles that one can use as a hand rail for the rest of the way up the hill, while she was smart enough to go around the long way and meet us at the top), we went on to the rock painting museum, which was full of interesting information. At this time of the year they aren’t open full time. Instead visitors can ring the bell, and if anyone is there they will let you in. We did. He was, and we had a very nice conversation with him about the geology, the rock carvings, the stone age, etc. I also asked him about soapstone, but he didn’t know anything on that topic, so I pointed him to the new book on the topic.
On the way home from that adventure her “Engine fault” warning light came on. However, hers is a new car, with all the warrantees etc. in place. Therefore she needed only make an appointment, and the next morning they came and picked it up from her house to have a look and see what it was complaining about.
That evening I was finally inspired to work on my Viking coat in progress, and now all of the pieces have been assembled, but much work remains to be done (cutting the neck, seam finishing, adding the tablet weaving plus or minus some fur on the cuffs). That evening I also got an email saying that I didn’t get the grant I had applied for last week (I am impressed at how fast they made the decision), complete with some bullet-points giving feedback as to why they decided to say no.
I kinda ignored the message at the time, not feeling up to dealing with it just then, but this morning I woke up after only five hours of sleep thinking of that, so I got up and added the feedback to the scrivener card for the application, marked it as rejected, and also gave it a “feedback given” key word, then went through the other couple of grants that have also been rejected and labelled them “feedback not given”.
Tuesday evening I had also had a message from David wondering if the workshop was also going to give us a 50% discount because of the extra day. Therefore, this morning (Wednesday) I gave them a call to ask if there is a possibility of a discount, since the delay is costing me extra in hotel costs. She said that she would talk with her boss. She also explained that the reason they had ordered the part that they did was that if they had ordered the official Volkswagen replacement part it would have cost more and taken three days to arrive. Therefore they ordered a “pirate” part, which had been advertised as fitting my car, but it was too small. I am not holding my breath that they will agree to any discount at all, but if one doesn’t ask then the answer is already “no”.
If the car is, in fact done this afternoon (she tells me that it will be dealt with at 13:00 when the shop workers are back from lunch) we will continue on to Trondheim. However, since the workshop will be closed tomorrow, we are considering doing another adventure instead.
Pretty before I had even gotten fully out of Luleå the car suddenly started shaking a bit. It did this right around the same time that I passed from one colour/texture of asphalt to another, so I wasn’t clear if the shaking was the car, or the road, so I called David. He suggested pulling over and checking to see if the wheels had been tightened properly after the break work that had just been done. I checked first the right front tire and noticed that there was a fair bit of hot air coming off of the car by that tire, but didn’t notice if it was from the engine or the tire, and even commented something about it being warm to David, with whom I was still talking. Then I went on to the other tires but didn’t really notice at that that they were not also warm.
The tire bolts not being loose I got back into the car and started driving again, this time not noticing any shaking, but I did notice that it wasn’t handling normally—getting up to speed required way more gas pressure than normal. However, it was a weekend and there wasn’t anything I could do about it just then, and once it got up to speed and cruise control was set it returned to normal behaviour.
The first part of the plan went well. I arrived at L&R’s place and got the tour (they recently bought a couple of old houses out in the country near Umeå. They fixed up the smaller to live in now, and they plan to fix up the larger to be their main home, but the plans for that one are a bit more ambitious, so it is good that the smaller house was mostly useable from the beginning.
After visiting briefly with them I was feeling kinda tried and not up for joining Hjalmar at his friend’s birthday party, so instead I called Linda and Markus, who live in the same apartment complex as Hjalmar, and invited myself over. She was delighted to hear from me, and we spent an hour or two cuddling and catching up before I did my yoga and went to sleep on her couch.
Bright and early the next morning I went over to Hjalmar’s and we did the last of his packing and hit the road. An hour or so later, after a short break in driving the car, which had behaved fine for all of the rest of the driving the day before, started shaking again. So we pulled over, and looked at the tires again, and this time Hjalmar noticed that the metal part of the right front tire was really hot (as in don’t touch it), but none of the other four were. He called his friend Ingemar for advice, and I called David and consulted him. Ingemar said that it could be that the break is engaging, but not retracting again after engaging, and thus keeps rubbing against the break pad as we drive, which would cause thing to heat up. He said that one can manually pry it up and then avoid breaking again.
We tried this, and the car didn’t shake when we next drove. However, even if one doesn’t want to use the breaks, sooner or later one must (especially as by this time we had left the E4 (major N-S highway in Sweden) and were one a minor highway heading inland, which means more frequent villages for which there is at least reduced speed limits, and sometimes it was necessary to turn from one highway or the other.
We stopped and checked now and then. On one occasion when I was driving the car never shook, and when we checked the tire temperature it wasn’t at all warm. Then Hjalmar took over and it started shaking again, and the tire got hot. We managed to limp it along till the town of Sollefteå, where Åsa, one of our SCA friends lives, by which point it was having issues every time we tried to drive it.
So, we called Åsa, and she said come on over. When we arrived, we told them the problem, and wondered if they could recommend a car repair shop who could have a look. At which point Jonny, her husband, promptly grabbed his coveralls, and car jack, and took the tire off (it was so hot it was smoking). He cleaned up the breaks, lubricated them, saw that things were retracting, and then put it all back together and we tested it, saw that the breaks worked, and, after visiting a bit longer we set back out. However, soon thereafter it started shaking again, and when we stopped and checked, the tire was once again really hot, so back to Åsa’s we went.
It being a Sunday evening no shops were open, so she made up the guest bed for us and we had a pleasant visit before going to sleep kinda early. I woke up at 02:00 that morning thinking of the fact that I still needed to compile a list of shops to call, so I got up and, with Google’s help, filled in a spreadsheet of numbers and opening times etc. Then I went back to bed, setting an alarm for 6:45 (since the earliest opening time was 07:00).
At 07:15 I woke again, and realized that I hadn’t heard the alarm, so I got up and begun calling. The first several places I called had no time available in the next two weeks, but the next agreed to have a look today. So Åsa led me there in her car, and we transferred the stuff to her car and returned to the house to wait. (Where I took a nap!)
That afternoon the shop called to say that they could fix it, but needed to order a part, which wouldn’t be there till Tuesday morning, and it would cost 9,000 SEK to fix. I wasn’t happy to hear this, especially as I was supposed to have already been in Trondheim, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I called David, and he called the shop and spoke to them to get better details about the work and the need for it than I could get with my not so good Swedish, and then he called to tell me that he had suggested they do yet one more important task while they were at it, which would add yet another 1,000 SEK to the price.
Since we had the day available Åsa took us out for a bit of sight-seeing. First, we went up the hill to get the overview of the area (how nice it was to have a decent sized hill to go up; I really miss topography living in Luleå). Then we went into town to go to the museum, but it was Monday, and museums in Sweden (and, I think, all of Europe) are closed on Mondays. So she called her friend who works at the museum, who was about to be heading past the museum anyway, so she joined us for a quick 20 minute chat about interesting things to see in the area. At her suggestion (and to the delight of both Hjalmar and I) the next stop was some Iron-Age burial mounds, which are located not too far south of town along the river bank.
On the way home we stopped by the store and picked up stuff to do some baking. We made one apple cake for Åsa and Jonny as a thank you for being so kind to host us and take us on adventures etc., and a dairy-free, gluten free apple and sugared ginger pie (almond and millet with coconut crust) that Hjalmar could eat. (I tried both the next day after breakfast and can report that both are yummy.)
When we went to bed Monday night the plan was to sleep in (since the car part wouldn’t arrive till the afternoon anyway), and, when the car was ready that afternoon, we could head on to Trondheim (six more hours driving time, under normal conditions), where we could at least work in the shop on Wednesday before it closed for the holiday on Thursday. However, late Tuesday morning the shop contacted me to say that the part had arrived, but was the wrong size, and that the new part they had ordered wouldn’t be here till Wednesday afternoon.
We sighed at the additional delay, sent messages to everyone who needed to know (the workshop, the Airbnb, David), and then hopped in Åsa’s car to go a bit further from town to see some stone-age rock carvings along the bank of the river. That was a very delightful stop. The river is running quite high just now, with all of the snow melt, so the interaction of the river and rocks would have been reason enough to be there, but the many rock carvings (which have been painted over in red to make them more visible) were also interesting. These carvings were done by a people who hunted moose, and many hundreds of the carvings are of moose.
After playing a while at the river side looking at the rock (a lovely gneissic rock, with lots of folding, and one (that we saw) 20 to 30 cm wide diabase dike cutting through it) and the paintings and the examples of stone age style fish traps, and much more recent example of a water driven mill house, we went back up the hill (Hjalmar and I choosing to go up the steep steps that went half way up the hill to the road, and then stopped, just were the slope gets even steeper, to be replaced by a rope on poles that one can use as a hand rail for the rest of the way up the hill, while she was smart enough to go around the long way and meet us at the top), we went on to the rock painting museum, which was full of interesting information. At this time of the year they aren’t open full time. Instead visitors can ring the bell, and if anyone is there they will let you in. We did. He was, and we had a very nice conversation with him about the geology, the rock carvings, the stone age, etc. I also asked him about soapstone, but he didn’t know anything on that topic, so I pointed him to the new book on the topic.
On the way home from that adventure her “Engine fault” warning light came on. However, hers is a new car, with all the warrantees etc. in place. Therefore she needed only make an appointment, and the next morning they came and picked it up from her house to have a look and see what it was complaining about.
That evening I was finally inspired to work on my Viking coat in progress, and now all of the pieces have been assembled, but much work remains to be done (cutting the neck, seam finishing, adding the tablet weaving plus or minus some fur on the cuffs). That evening I also got an email saying that I didn’t get the grant I had applied for last week (I am impressed at how fast they made the decision), complete with some bullet-points giving feedback as to why they decided to say no.
I kinda ignored the message at the time, not feeling up to dealing with it just then, but this morning I woke up after only five hours of sleep thinking of that, so I got up and added the feedback to the scrivener card for the application, marked it as rejected, and also gave it a “feedback given” key word, then went through the other couple of grants that have also been rejected and labelled them “feedback not given”.
Tuesday evening I had also had a message from David wondering if the workshop was also going to give us a 50% discount because of the extra day. Therefore, this morning (Wednesday) I gave them a call to ask if there is a possibility of a discount, since the delay is costing me extra in hotel costs. She said that she would talk with her boss. She also explained that the reason they had ordered the part that they did was that if they had ordered the official Volkswagen replacement part it would have cost more and taken three days to arrive. Therefore they ordered a “pirate” part, which had been advertised as fitting my car, but it was too small. I am not holding my breath that they will agree to any discount at all, but if one doesn’t ask then the answer is already “no”.
If the car is, in fact done this afternoon (she tells me that it will be dealt with at 13:00 when the shop workers are back from lunch) we will continue on to Trondheim. However, since the workshop will be closed tomorrow, we are considering doing another adventure instead.
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