Chromeo Day 7, To Montreal, QC
After one day without a show, it was time to get back at it. Today I woke up in Brooklyn and had to go in to Times Square to pick up an SUV, then drive out to Long Island to get our trailer and gear, then pick up our other sound guy at Penn Station, then get P at his hotel and drive up to Montreal. Seemed painless and sort of planned out, but in NYC, nothing ever works out like that. I left the apartment at 8:30am and only got back in to the city at 4pm. It was awful and painfully long. By the time we went and got P it was 5pm and we still had to stop by a business office and run a couple other errands. It was almost 7pm by the time we left NYC. No good at all.
When we finally got on the highway, we noticed that the trailer was wobbling in a really weird way. Every time we picked up some speed, it started swerving all over the road. It was totally unsafe so we had to stop and make a call to U-Haul to ask them to send someone out to look at it.
Two hours later, someone shows up. We killed time by listening to the presidential debate on the radio. McCain is a disaster, my friends. It will be an absolute tragedy if he gets elected. To the US people: do the right thing, my friends...
So anyways, this mechanic, who showed up with his wife, seems to know what's up. He took the wheel off and his first reaction was that we had a broken axle. This is not good. This leaves us in New Paltz, NY for the night. He looked at it a little more to see if there was anything he could do at the moment, and discovered that the axle was actually not broken at all. It turns out that the geniuses at U-Haul didn't assemble the tire spindles properly. There's supposed to be a cotter pin that hold the wheel on to the axle, and it was missing entirely. It's not the kind of thing that can fall out on the road. It's the kind of thing that's left out because of gross negligence and incompetence. Thankfully we had to common sense to stop early, but had we kept going, the wheel would have flown off in to traffic and probably caused a major accident. Can you imagine the lawsuit? The good news is that a cotter pin is readily available, so after waiting another hour for it to get delivered, we were back on the road.
And about one exit later, we had to pull over again. For some reason, as soon as we started moving, the trailer lights died. So we stopped and inspected, and fortunately it was just a blown fuse. We were two vehicles traveling in convoy, and the other guys just happened to have the right fuse, so we were back on the road in less than 20mins.
By this time it was 12:15am. I left my place at 8:30am and we still have 5hrs to go til we got to Montreal. Talk about a long day. Tomorrow we only have to drive to Toronto. Best day ever...
When we finally got on the highway, we noticed that the trailer was wobbling in a really weird way. Every time we picked up some speed, it started swerving all over the road. It was totally unsafe so we had to stop and make a call to U-Haul to ask them to send someone out to look at it.
Two hours later, someone shows up. We killed time by listening to the presidential debate on the radio. McCain is a disaster, my friends. It will be an absolute tragedy if he gets elected. To the US people: do the right thing, my friends...
So anyways, this mechanic, who showed up with his wife, seems to know what's up. He took the wheel off and his first reaction was that we had a broken axle. This is not good. This leaves us in New Paltz, NY for the night. He looked at it a little more to see if there was anything he could do at the moment, and discovered that the axle was actually not broken at all. It turns out that the geniuses at U-Haul didn't assemble the tire spindles properly. There's supposed to be a cotter pin that hold the wheel on to the axle, and it was missing entirely. It's not the kind of thing that can fall out on the road. It's the kind of thing that's left out because of gross negligence and incompetence. Thankfully we had to common sense to stop early, but had we kept going, the wheel would have flown off in to traffic and probably caused a major accident. Can you imagine the lawsuit? The good news is that a cotter pin is readily available, so after waiting another hour for it to get delivered, we were back on the road.
And about one exit later, we had to pull over again. For some reason, as soon as we started moving, the trailer lights died. So we stopped and inspected, and fortunately it was just a blown fuse. We were two vehicles traveling in convoy, and the other guys just happened to have the right fuse, so we were back on the road in less than 20mins.
By this time it was 12:15am. I left my place at 8:30am and we still have 5hrs to go til we got to Montreal. Talk about a long day. Tomorrow we only have to drive to Toronto. Best day ever...
posted by t. at 3:36 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home