Poor Penelope

For those of you who don’t know, my car’s name is Penelope Protege… that will help you through the rest of this story.

Over the holiday weekend Will and I went to his parents’ beach house at Sunset Beach. We got on the road around 3:30pm on Sunday afternoon planning to arrive home around 6:00p. A friend was having people over and we were going to stop by to hang out for a while. Well, after I took a little nap on the road we were about 20 minutes past Wilmington… the battery light comes on in my car. Within about thirty seconds the check engine light comes on… then Will noticed the temperature needle was way high. He decides to call his brother Jamie and his wife since they left after us. Just in case we needed help they weren’t far behind us. THEN while Will was on the phone with Jamie, SMOKE started coming from the engine!!

We’re flying down 40West and we have to pull over really quick before the car explodes. I literally jump out of the car because I thought we were about to catch on fire. We have no clue what to do and we look at the smoky engine but have no idea what’s wrong. There were no leaks, no hoses missing, no spraying except the mysterious smoke. We decided to let it cool, tried to crank it again and it didn’t sound so good. We wait about thirty minutes until Jamie and Whitney pull up behind us and we decided to try driving to see if we could at least get off the side of 40. Two miles after we set out smoke comes out everywhere again.

Thankfully Jamie has a membership to AAA so we call for a tow truck. After about an hour a guy comes and tows it back to Wilmington where Penelope is still waiting to be worked on. She hasn’t needed too much work the last eight years I’ve had her so I can only hope she’s handling it alright. The mechanic told us yesterday there is a hole in her radiator, she needs a new water pump, and numerous other belts and parts need replacing. This wonderful total comes to $1743.42… AAAH!!

Did I mention that I haven’t gotten a paycheck in two months and we’ve been pretty tight lately??! Well after an evening of debating Will calls the mechanic back and tells him to fix only what is necessary…  We are hoping to get about another year out of Penelope before we have to sell her.

She has been my only car since I learned how to drive. How many people can say they still have the same car they got when they were sixteen (unless they’re currently seventeen or something)? She’s been the best little car. And I don’t care what anyone says, the monkey front plate and the Tweety bird floor mats are perfect for her.

For now I am driving my dad’s second car which he kind of gave us for our anniversary… just not legally ours yet. Just pray that she can get fixed and it won’t cost us our entire savings account! And pray that she will last a long long time once we get her back.