What It’s Like to Be Married to a Car Enthusiast

What It’s Like to Be Married to a Car Enthusiast

There are some stories from our life that, if I hadn’t lived them myself, I probably wouldn’t believe them. This is one of those stories.

Years ago, Scott found an Omni on eBay for $750. Now, before you think that sounds completely ridiculous, we had previously bought a car for $50 or $100 and put about 40,000 miles on it. So apparently, in our world, $750 felt almost extravagant.

There was only one small problem. We lived in Phoenix, and the car was in Illinois, somewhere outside of St. Louis.

Scott wanted the car whether it ran or not, so before we made any plans, he specifically asked the seller if it was safe to drive all the way back to Phoenix. He told the guy, “I’m buying it either way. I just need to know whether I should drive it home or bring a tow dolly.”

The guy assured him they had just put more than 1,000 miles on it and it should be fine.

Perfect. What could possibly go wrong?

We rented a car and headed east. We also brought Kalie, our cockapoo, who got carsick, because clearly this adventure needed another moving part.

We gave her Dramamine, loaded ourselves into a very nice rental car that was probably nicer than anything we owned at the time, and took a couple of days to get there.

When we finally drove out to pick up the Omni, we had been told it was at a dealership. Technically, I suppose there were cars there. There were three or four of them sitting in a dirt patch in front of a farm.

Scott and I looked at each other.

Uh-oh.

We got out, opened the hood of the Omni, and it was full of cobwebs.

Now, I am not a mechanic, but even I looked at Scott and said, “With all these cobwebs, why do I have a feeling they didn’t just drive 1,000 miles in the last month?”

He got in. The car started.

“Okay,” he said. “That’s step one.”

Then we discovered it had absolutely no gas. The closest gas station was miles away.

Somehow we got gas, got the Omni back to the hotel, and Scott went to AutoZone and bought everything he thought he needed to tune it up.

In the hotel parking lot.

Meanwhile, I kept asking one very reasonable question.

“Do we really have to return the rental car?”

Because I had a feeling.

Scott, of course, said we were fine.

So we returned the rental car.

The next morning, we started heading home. Except we weren’t going straight home.

Our friend Ken, who was president of our Mopar club, had asked us to stop somewhere around Poplar Bluff and look at an old station wagon he was thinking about buying. So we headed south.

Somewhere along the way, the Omni stalled. Scott got it going. Then it stalled again. And again.

We basically limped our way through Missouri.

At one point, the Omni could not make it up a hill, and a guy in a truck literally pushed us up the hill. Then, because it was a stick shift, we coasted downhill.

Perfectly normal road trip behavior.

Eventually, we called the guy with the station wagon and asked him to come meet us because we were having a few technical difficulties.

He did.

We looked at the station wagon. It was beautiful. It had recently won a couple of car show trophies.

And, interestingly enough, this car actually had just been driven more than 1,000 miles.

We told Ken it looked great. Then we limped the Omni to a hotel.

Remember, Kalie was still with us through all of this.

By now, we were out in the middle of nowhere. I remember stopping at a grocery store that still had a dirt floor.

I asked to use the bathroom, and the woman told me to go out the door. For a moment, I thought she was sending me to an outhouse.

Thankfully, the bathroom door was just on the outside of the building.

So now we’re sitting in a hotel with a car that isn’t making it home. It was a long weekend, which made everything even more interesting.

We started trying to figure out how to get ourselves, Kalie, and this $750 Omni back to Phoenix.

We thought about renting a car. We couldn’t find anyone who would let us take one out of Missouri.

We thought about the train. The train didn’t pick up passengers anywhere near us, and they didn’t allow dogs anyway.

Then Scott had an idea.

This sentence has played a significant role in our marriage.

He called Ken and basically told him he needed to buy the station wagon. Not because we were pressuring him, of course. Just because it was now apparently our only way home.

Ken couldn’t wire the money until Tuesday, so we spent the long weekend at the hotel while Scott continued trying to revive the Omni.

Tuesday finally came. Ken wired the money. Scott went to U-Haul, rented a tow dolly, hooked the Omni behind the station wagon, and off we went.

We were happy. We were heading home. We had solved the problem.

Or so we thought.

Somewhere near Oklahoma City, we stopped at a little gas station and filled up the station wagon. Then we got back on the highway.

Rush hour.

The station wagon was running great. The Omni was riding behind us on the tow dolly. We were smiling.

Life was good.

And then the station wagon started sputtering.

We pulled off on the left side of the highway because there was a grassy area there. Not the nice, easy side. The fast-lane side.

Scott opened the hood.

The fuel filter was packed with dirt.

Apparently, we had gotten the bottom of the gas station’s tank.

He managed to clean it enough to get us moving again.

Then came the fun part.

Old cars didn’t always have passenger-side mirrors, so Scott asked me, “Can you see when it’s safe?”

“No.”

He gunned it anyway.

Somehow we survived.

From that point on, about every tank of gas, the station wagon would start sputtering again. So we stopped at Walmart and Scott bought every fuel filter they had.

Every time we stopped for gas, he changed the fuel filter.

Then we started going shorter and shorter distances before needing another one. Apparently, the dirt had worked its way into the gas lines.

We slept a couple of nights in the car at truck stops and continued limping toward Arizona.

Eventually, we reached Gallup, New Mexico.

If you know the drive toward Flagstaff, you know there is a whole lot of uphill ahead.

The station wagon looked at that hill and essentially said, “Nope.”

We pulled into Gallup.

Scott said, “I have an idea.”

There it is again.

His first idea was to buy a five or ten gallon gas container, fill it with gas, hook it into the car somehow, and have me hold it in my lap.

I looked at him and said, “Oh, like hell you are.”

Apparently, that was the moment he realized he had married a woman with limits.

So he came up with another idea.

And this is when I became convinced that Scott had watched far too many episodes of MacGyver.

He went into AutoZone and bought every bit of fuel line they had, along with a bunch of zip ties.

The employees were watching him, clearly wondering what this man was doing in their parking lot.

He took the fuel line from the gas tank of the Omni, ran it under the Omni, over the tow dolly, under the station wagon, and connected it wherever it needed to go so the station wagon could run off the gas in the Omni.

Yes.

You read that correctly.

We were now putting gas in the car we were towing so that the car doing the towing could run.

I am quite sure this was completely safe, legal, and recommended by every automobile manufacturer involved.

Scott was very proud of himself.

From Gallup to Flagstaff, we kept stopping for gas. But we didn’t put the gas in the station wagon.

We put it in the Omni.

Which got us some very interesting looks.

Somewhere around two in the morning, we finally reached Flagstaff. We filled up again and started down I-17 toward Phoenix.

We were almost home.

Then...

BA-BANG.

The muffler fell off the station wagon.

So now we were driving down the mountain toward Phoenix in the middle of the night sounding like a Mack truck.

By the time we got back to our condo, I think it was around five in the morning.

Scott was trying very carefully to pull into the neighborhood without waking everyone up.

There was absolutely nothing quiet about us.

The next day, we called Ken.

We told him we would bring him his beautiful station wagon, but we also had to bring our Omni with it.

He would understand when he saw them.

Eventually, both cars were fixed. Ken went on to win trophies with the station wagon.

Scott drove the Omni for quite a while, got it running really well, and eventually sold it.

About a month later, the new owner totaled it.

That one hurt Scott’s heart.

So what did I learn from the $750 eBay Omni adventure?

Probably this:

If you are married to a car enthusiast and he ever says, “I have an idea,” you may want to buckle your seat belt.

And possibly keep the rental car.