Written by: Matthew Orquia
Two summers ago, my older brother and I made what can only be described as a terrible, foolish decision. No reasonable person would have made the choices we made. As a result of this, I now have one of my favorite summer memories of all time.
It started in the garage of my parents’ home in Atlanta, Georgia. Inside the garage was a 1986 Nissan 300zx that my brother purchased during his senior year of high school.
The car had seen better days; it was coated in an acrid yellow that sparingly covered the decades of previous paint jobs. On the door jambs and the roof of the interior, where the trim had fallen off, you could see the original color: a brilliant, metallic gray that offered a brief glimpse into the car’s past lives.
After performing several unorthodox and probably unadvisable repairs on the car, we fired up the car to test our handiwork, and the familiar low drone of the engine filled the garage. Surprisingly, our fixes had worked, as did the makeshift switch to control the car’s fan, which was held in place on the dash with a bread clip.
This was the night before my brother and I planned to drive to San Diego, a more than 2,000 mile journey, in his well-loved and decades-old Nissan.
The next day, we cruised through the first hours of the trip on the highway with a blind confidence that we both held out of willful naivety. Within six hours, the droning of the engine dropped out from around us, and the car meandered down the highway for a few hundred feet before we were stopped on the side of the road beneath an underpass.
For a moment, we sat in silence and heard the rush of cars blasting by us. Then both of us laughed at the absurdity of the situation; deep down we had known that this road trip would be anything but trouble-free.
Based on the sights and sounds of our breakdown, we suspected that a dead battery was our problem, and luckily we had brought a spare. Within a few minutes we were headed toward our destination once again, only now it had been revised to the nearest auto parts store.
As we slowed to a stop in the AutoZone parking lot, the sudden lack of cooling air flow revealed to us the horrible truth that it was summer in the South, and we were gonna be stopped in the heat for a while.
My brother walked out of the store with a collection of various items including a new alternator, and we stared at the troublesome part in the car for a few moments before starting our repair efforts. Several hours later the engine cranked to life successfully, and we were back on the road.
At a stoplight right by the shop, passengers in a car that was stopped next to us rolled their window down and peered at our recently-repaired vehicle.
“Nice car,” they said. “Where are you headed?”
We told them of our lofty expectations to reach California and they chuckled in response.
“In that thing? Good luck,” they said as they rolled their window back down.
We knew it was crazy, but this emergency repair pit stop made us even more determined to make it to our final destination. As we pulled away from the stoplight, both of us smiled in anticipation for the rest of our journey.
Our remaining miles were full of many more repairs and an ever-so brief moment where the car caught on fire, but miraculously, we pulled into San Diego unharmed and on all four wheels.
Although my parents may not be thrilled with it, I did learn a lesson from this ill-conceived road trip, albeit one that should be applied in moderation: Do crazy things. Try achieving the nearly impossible. It won’t always work out, and there are bound to be breakdowns and broken alternators along the way, but I promise that the memories are worth it.
