Always an adventure

I made it to Mississauga and have been visiting with friends.  The first night I spent with a good friend and former work colleague.  We went out for supper and a movie.  The van was quite popular in her parents Brampton neighborhood!

The next day I took the van downtown Toronto, which was a real treat...traffic was busy, but not unmanageable and my Blackberry maps led me directly where I needed to go. Of course, not without incident...when visiting an old friend of my daughter's in downtown Toronto, he offered me his parking space in the underground parking. The entranceway was quite low, and then once I drove through the garage door, I had to drive down hill where the roof and floor slope steeply together.  There was no mention of what clearance was required, so we thought we would try it...we were short by about 2 inches and the roof cap brought up solid and the van was then hanging on the hill, with nothing but my panicked feet to brake with.  My friend thought, sure, lets just put it in neutral and he will push me back out.  Um, no, I don't think you can do that, as it's a pretty heavy van! His husband came down and we managed to wrestle it back up the slope and out the door.  It wasn't easy, given the van is a standard.  Phew, crisis averted.  We had a pleasant lunch in the neighborhood, and then we parted ways as I headed through downtown Toronto on a Friday afternoon to Oakville.


I met up with some university friends in Oakville at a pub for a few hours, great to see some familiar faces and meet someone I hadn't met in person, but knew from online.  After a quick beer and chat, I was off to the next stop at another friend's place.  I was having trouble steering the van though, it was pretty HARD, so I figured the power steering fluid was low, so decided to root around the cabinet for some fluid as the person I bought the van from had several bottles of various liquids stored for the van there.  First I found what I thought was the right fluid, but was Gunk, meant to seal off leaks.  Unfortunately I didn't realize that until AFTER I poured about 4 times what was required of that particularl liquid into the WRONG resevoir. Oh shit...however I still didn't realize it was the wrong resevoir until I poured in about half a bottle of power steering fluid.  OH SHIT. After a few panicked calls to CAA, and a couple of mechanic friends, they calmed me down and we simply emptied out the resevoir and filled the coolant back up again, and then found the proper resevoir for the fluid and filled that.  I haven't started the van yet, but I am HOPING it will be just fine.  I had to get at the engine to do the cleanout, so had to empty the van bed out into the parking lot, where a group of bystanding children watched from afar at this bizarre van that just thrrew up all of its contents on the ground.


Life is never boring when I'm in town...