The Katella Connection

Friday night. No work, and two tickets to a ballgame. Pretty sweet. Corrie got to carpool to work, so all I had to do was get the nice car to her work in Newport Beach in time to make the game. I left at 4:30ish, which is the wrong time to try and take any highway in any direction, and knowing this, I immediately went for Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway.

The PCH is little more than a multi-lane road (in this area) that hugs the coast for stretches and rides through small beach-towns for other stretches. I knew it would be packed as well, but no more so than usual, which, while heavily trafficked, is usually better moving than most major freeways.

Within two miles of Corrie's work, our Passat started beeping at me in screaming tones, and quickly I found the computer screen that stated the problem: STOP it said in between flashes of "Check Coolant" and "Service Manual". The temp gauge was buried in the 260 degree range. I found a place to pull over and checked the coolant and oil. Both seemed okay. I started out again, and within two minutes the beeping and screaming and STOP wouldn't go away until I was at a stoplight again.

Finally making it to Corrie's work, we discussed the problem, and wanted to get to the game in one piece as well as getting home with a working car. Corrie drove most of the way to the game, having to pull over into parking lots every few seconds to let the car cool. At times while cooling off, we could hear the coolant in the system gurgling and boiling like crazy. At idle, it was fine, but not at any driving RPMs.

There we were, cruising with the heater on high, just limping our way through Newport and Costa Mesa and Santa Ana and finally into Anaheim.

After the game we'd hoped that maybe the entire system would have been cooled off enough, but that wasn't the case. Of course it wasn't, because the problem is mechanical, like the water pump not circulating the coolant throughout the engine.

Los Angeles, and here I'm lumping everything from Thousand Oaks in Ventura County all the way down to Anaheim and Irvine in Orange County, is known around the country as a patchwork quilt collection of freeways, organically connecting different cities and communities with each other. What's less well-known to drivers outside of California is that LA is also connected with a far-reaching network of surface streets. This network is what we took advantage of when we slowly limped home from the ballpark in Anaheim.

One of the major east-west streets in Long Beach is Willow Street. The hotel my company put Corrie up in during her trip to find a place for us back in April is on Willow. If you travel west on Willow, it leaves Long Beach and turns into East Sepulveda, and then West Sepulveda, before petering out after turning north in a community called Torrance. Heading east on Willow takes you past the 405, and then past the 605 Freeway, where you leave Long Beach again, and the name of the street changes again, this time to Katella. If you stay on Katella long enough heading east, you'll arrive at Angel Stadium.

Holy cow. Katella is one of the stadium's corner streets, and is our Willow. Awesome. That distance is less than nineteen miles.

So...we started out down Katella, heading west, and had to make a quick stop to let the car cool down. That was pretty much our modus operandi: limp home, jump off the main road and let the car cool as needed, and get back out and do it again until we get all the way back to our mechanic near our apartment. We planned to park in front of their driveway and come back in the morning and get the car serviced on Saturday.

The plan worked, but took plenty of time, like almost two hours. We got the car situated in front of the mechanics, in the driveway in front of the closed gate, ready to come back at 9 the next morning.

Too bad they opened at 8.

In the final kick to the scrotum, when we got there this morning to get the car worked on, it was gone, having been towed and impounded.

Now we're almost $225 lighter, and that was just to boost the car.

The impound lot was on Willow.