The Journey – car troubles in Pennsylvania

Bad weather and car troubles had to happen sooner or later. No car trip would an adventure unless these events are part of it. We had had no problems with either until we were in the low ridges of the Appalachian mountains in Pennsylvania. The Appalachian region is generally considered the geographical dividing line between the eastern seaboard of the United States and the Midwest region of the country.

We encountered large thunderstorms few miles out of Danville, Pennsylvania in the mountains. The wind driven rain was a torrid down pour causing everything to disappeared outside the car’s window a few times including the car hood. Cars were parked bumper to bumper underneath overpasses. Speeding trucks whipped the driving rain up from the road bed into a blinding dirty fog. I followed their lead and kept driving but slower. After about twenty-five minutes of creeping through the downpour, the sky cleared up and the sun came out. I told Carol if we had pulled over, we would still be on the mountaintop in the drenching rain. We were out of the rain but her mind was still on the mountain with the fright of speeding trailer trucks engulfing us with clouds of dirty back wash from their tires.

We were a few miles from Stroudsburg Pennsylvania when the front of the car begin to wobble violently side-to-side whenever I went over ten miles an hour. I pulled off the road and checked the wheels, looked under the hood. I could not see anything that would cause the problem. A state trooper pulled up behind us. He looked at the wheels and under the hood. He couldn’t see anything wrong. He directed me to a gas station at the next exit that repaired cars.

I drove slow, as slow as when we were caught in the drenching in the mountains. I had a difficult time controlling the steering wheel. We pulled into the gas station, a man was standing outside smoking a cigarette. His eyes got big and the cigarette fell from his mouth as he watched us wobbled into the station. When we got out of the car he said he could believe his eyes. The left front tire was wobbling side to side. He had never seen anything like it before.

We had lost three tire lugs off the wheel. Only two lugs, next to each other, were holding the tire on the wheel. The gas station didn’t stock Peugeot replacement parts. In fact they had never seen or heard of a Peugeot. We looked in the yellow pages for the nearest Peugeot dealer. There was one in New Jersey. Thank goodness the station did have some metric lugs that fit. They were plain tire lugs not the chrome-plated lugs like on the other tires rims, but they would hold the tire onto the wheel and stop the wobbling that’s all we cared about.

We didn’t realize that you don’t go driving around America in a Peugeot. Most people had never heard of the French car. We were very lucky to find a dealer close. There were very few dealerships in the United State. With all the fast hard driving and bad weather we had been through we felt blessed nothing happened to us.