First, the good news: The 1998 Toyota Sienna van with over 165,000 miles which I duct-taped together for the ride to Virginia survived the trip up and back.<\/p>\n
And now the bad: The air conditioner did not.<\/p>\n
In fact, the air conditioner went out about two hours into the trip on the way up. But thankfully, it was overcast and cool once we hit the mountains in east Tennessee, so it didn’t really matter. It even stayed relatively cool for July during our visit.<\/p>\n
But the trip back yesterday evoked way too many memories of those hot retro rides from the 1960s–the choking exhaust fumes, the jarring sound of air brakes, the wet cling of the clothes, the rush of hot air through your hair and into your ears. When it started to rain in Knoxville, we collectively groaned at the prospect of having to roll up our windows and the steamy sauna that would likely ensue.<\/p>\n
“Can’t we try it one more time?” Number Three pleaded.<\/p>\n
“It won’t work,” I logically intoned.<\/p>\n
Eyegal reached down and pressed the “AC” button whose light had all trip long flashed in a desperate “S.O.S.” Somewhere deep within its bowels there was a commotion, and then–cool air.<\/p>\n
And for the next hour or so, for as long as we were in the rain, it worked.<\/p>\n
Talk about your traveling mercies.<\/p>\n
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First, the good news: The 1998 Toyota Sienna van with over 165,000 miles which I duct-taped together for the ride to Virginia survived the trip up and back. And now the bad: The air conditioner did…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,54,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","category-nostalgia","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=766"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9559,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766\/revisions\/9559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ocularfusion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}