Seven Miles

Walking is Good for You!

It's seven miles from the transmission shop to our house. That's not very long by car, maybe ten minutes (depending on who is driving!), but it is a lot longer while on foot. Nearly two hours.

How do I know this?

Mary has been experiencing some issues with her Hyundai Elantra lately. Sometimes the car seems to shudder as it transitions between gears; sometimes it 'kicks' at odd times, as though the ignition is not working quite right. It's very intermittent (naturally). It happens every now and then. She drives about 30 miles each way to work each day and notices it every once in a while, not often enough to track the source definitively, but enough to cause anxiety.

We took the car over to Firestone (our go-to auto place at the moment; I haven't found a really reliable mechanic shop in the area that is both efficient and available, which is another reason I'd rather work on the cars myself) and described the problem to them. They said they didn't do transmission work (which I knew) and they didn't want to try to diagnose anything until after the transmission shop had a chance to look at it.

So I took it over to the transmission shop (highly recommended by everyone around) and they performed a complete analysis of it and found nothing wrong. Since I've been a good customer of theirs, they didn't charge me for it (they're really nice guys).

But the seven miles.

It's seven miles from the transmission shop to our house, but I didn't actually know this until the morning I took the car to the transmission shop. It was Monday morning at 7 am, which is far too early to get anyone else out of bed to follow me to the shop and bring me home while they work on the car, so I figured I'd just bring my laptop with me and work remotely from the shop while waiting for them to finish the analysis. But when I got there, the mechanic said it would take him a few hours before he could get to it; apparently there was a 'queue' (although when I asked him if there was a 'queue', he looked at me quizzically until I asked if there was a 'line' and then he understood what I was asking). 

Well, I didn't mind sitting in the waiting room for an hour or two, but "a few hours" is a bit ambiguous for my taste, so I thought to myself that I'd just walk up the grocery store up the street and give Cheryl a call to come pick me up. I didn't want her to drive all the way down to the shop because (1) it's a small shop on the wrong side of a busy street and very difficult to find the first time, and (2) near impossible to cross over to the right side of the busy street with all the traffic.

And besides that, it was still only 7 in the morning and highly doubtful that Cheryl would be ready to jump in the car before the caffeine had taken effect (and she was probably still getting through her first cup).

So I needed to kill some time, and there was the sidewalk. I started walking.

Got to the grocery store and it was only 7:30. I was feeling good, quite energetic, and decided not to call quite yet. Instead, I wondered how long it would take me to get to the next major strip mall which was just down the street aways. So I kept going.

Got to the strip mall and it was only 8:15. Still didn't call. Wondered how long it would take me to walk down to Horrock's (a combination grocery store / plant store / lunch counter). Kept walking.

Got to Horrock's around 8:30. Still didn't call. Wondered how long it would take me to walk down to the Library.

Got to the Library around 8:45. Still didn't call. I was almost home! So kept walking.

Got to our neighborhood around 9 am. Kept walking.

Arrived home around 9:10, exhausted, hot, sweaty but very happy and feeling accomplished. Felt really fantastic after so long of doing very little strenuous walking at all.

Looked it up on-line afterward and figured I'd walked seven miles.

Still got it in me. Yeah!