What's Your Saddest 'Stuck On The Side Of The Road' Story?

I read this and thought it would be a fun thread to recreate here.

I was driving to college from Danbury to Hartford, CT on I84 East with my girlfriend and her roommate in my 1972 Chevelle. All of a sudden there was a torrential thunderstorm downpour. A lot of cars were pulling over and stopping to wait it out. As my motto is ‘Press on Regardless’, I slowed way down to a crawl, but kept going. The girls were freaking out and the backseat drivers were screaming at me to pull over.

When I pulled over to shut them up, I drove through a river of runoff along the curb and my ignition flooded. We were stuck there for 3 hours until it dried out.

Lesson Learned: Never listen to backseat drivers.

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I was driving back home to New Hampshire from Utah (yes, Utah) after a failed attempt to find work there. In total it took me about 4 days to get back. One night, I pulled into a rest stop with no overnight restriction, turned off the engine, laid my seat back, stuffed a jumper under my lower back (where the fold in the seat is) and dozed off until 10am.

Notice there how I didn't mention that I turned off my headlights.

yeah...

I drive a small manual so I figured if I could push my car to the ramp down to the highway I could bump start the car, but my car isn't that small and I'm not that beefy. Thankfully someone passing by was kind enough to help me jump start the car.

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Many years a go when I had a modified Corolla GTi I had just fitted an engine conversion and there was some jiggling to fit a clutch cover, friction plate and flywheel between the transmission and new engine. The bolts seemed to work and I was out testing the motor so giving it some beans. I missed 2nd to 3rd and instantly the engine over revved off the tacho before I could dip the clutch.

I had to coast to the side with zero drive in gear thinking I had totally nuked the engine on the first drive. Turned out the flywheel bolts we used had a fractional amount of play and that missed gear was enough to shear all 6 bolts clean off doing no other damaged than to my pride. 6 custom interference bolts later and it was back on the road for many years reliably.

There's a trend here.

Few years later and out showing off my Lotus Seven style kit car, which had always been totally reliable, to a visiting colleague. The engine totally cuts out and and for some reason I instantly think of the fuel pump and yep the ground had come lose but shorted the pump to death. My AA recovery had run out the day before but luckily my colleague was covered but we still had to wait 2 hours to be towed back to the company car park. No home recovery in the deal but a generous colleague towed me all the way home.

Another one.

More recently out in my converted V8 RX7 doing a shake down run for a new valve cover breather setup one of the small "steam" pipes on the V8 heads pops off and shoots litres of water as steam out the engine before I could pull over to a lay by. Now stuck with an engine dangerously down on coolant, no phone and on a really hot day I'm scratching my head and decided to search the bushes in desperation for a water source.

Yeah I found one alright a battered plastic bottle filled with a mysterious liquid obviously discard by some trucker. I had no choice so poured it in the rad and suffered a piss stinking engine for several days until I could flush the coolant out!

Funnily none of my regular cars have let me down.

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My friend drained the transfer case on his old Jeep Cherokee because it was filled with water from getting submerged. He filled it with fresh 90 weight oil and we loaded up to go on a trip a few hours away.

Unfortunately those transfer cases use automatic transmission fluid. We headed up a hill at around 65 MPH when the transfer case grenaded. The rear driveshaft was no longer attached to the drivetrain and furiously smashed into the ground and the underbody as it was still attached to the rear axle and being spun by the momentum of rolling forward. We broke down somewhere about ~17-18 miles from his father's house and spent a few hours walking.

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  • Stopped at a rest stop.
  • Got out to get a coffee.
  • Opened trunk to get something out.
  • Needed both hands, so sat keys down
  • Immediately thought to self, "You're going to forget you sat those there."
  • Closed trunk
  • Tugged on door handle.
  • Facepalmed.

sigh

I'm a very, very absent minded person.

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Is there genuinely a situation where you'd every really have to pull over for rain? Perhaps it's just because I'm from Utah and I'm very used to calmly driving in 10+ inches of snow since I first got my license, but really in rain? Seems like an unjustified reason.

What sort of work were you trying to get? Sorry that my homeland couldn't accommodate you.

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Don't start that debate!

It was fecked when I bought it and would have likely been scrapped otherwise :slight_smile:

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Pulled over about 17yrs ago and I am still here...

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In the middle of a 1000+ Km drive the accelerator cable said "nope" and suddely broke while cruising at 120Km/h. Fortunately everything was solved in matter of a few hours and not a day. That cable is still holding on strong since that trip.

Was in the process of moving from LA to Flagstaff and on the way back to LA to grab more stuff, I got pulled over (unjustly), car smelled like weed and I told them I had it and a medicinal recommendation, but it lead to a field sobriety test (which I passed.......while stoned AF lol) and me being given 3 tickets:

-No proof of insurance (though I did have coverage)
-Speeding (I had just exited a construction zone along the interstate so naturally I accelerated, but this was the reason he pulled me over)
-and of course possession (I didnt physically have my recommendation on me, so they took all my shit....).

I was pissed after that so I forgot that I was supposed to refill my tank at the next station, but I had a little under half a tank at this point so I figured I would surely run into another one before I ran out........ nope! Had to wait 2hr30min for AAA to get me some gas and also had to jump the battery because I was listening to music and had emergency flashers on the whole time.

Oh, and I did have to go to court but all the tickets were dropped :stuck_out_tongue:

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Anything. My contract with my employer prior to that expired so I found myself out of a job. I managed to land a job at Walgreens in Utah after it was put to me that I could go out and stay with relatives, but to make any reasonable amount of income in any reasonable amount of time was next to impossible once I got that job. After making a quick phone call two months later, my old boss rather enthusiastically agreed to hire me back as a full employee and I hightailed it back home as fast as I could. and then the side-of-the-road story happened... sometime when I was crossing New York, I think...

Walgreens will never hire me ever again and the family I have in Utah weren't too thrilled that I was leaving so soon after landing work, but in retrospect it was absolutely the right thing to do.

I just member berried my 2nd saddest story (thankfully I haven't been stuck too often).

The tale of the $700 bushing

I had a sweet little 1977 VW Scirocco and the alternator died.

It was a pretty easy fix, but the part was nearly $200. Then the alternator died again 2 days later. I figured I screwed up, so I brought it to a mechanic who charged me over $300. Later that day I attempted to drive about an hour to visit my GF. My headlights rapidly started to fade so I turned them off and tailgated anyone I could find with working headlights. Once I got to Hartford, I managed to park the car at the bus station to finish my trip.

I bought a new battery and made it home during the day. Then I brought the car to a VW dealer because obviously the mechanic had screwed up too. It's turned out that a rubber pad on the alternator bracket was worn out and the alternators were vibrating itself to death. The dealer had mercy on me because I had killed 3 alternators in a week and spent over $500 because of a 25 cent part.

They gave me the rubber washer and diagnosis for free and then I had to buy a 4th alternator.

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You had to remind me... ugh.

I used to have a Ford Probe GT. I was one of the nicest, prettiest cars I have owned... 10% of the time.
The other 90% of the time it was in the shop.

I used to drive out to Rhode Island to go surfing and usually I would put on my wetsuit in the car. I'm just gonna say this but there are a lot of racists in R.I. While surfing they would try to slice me open with their skegs and call me names. "Nigger, get off our beach!" One time my car wouldn't start, so I asked some guys to help push start me. Too bad they were racist also. "Pretty nice car boy... whadd ja do carjack somebody?" "How many food stamps does a ride like that cost... nigger." I burned rubber as fast as I could to get out of RI, but I needed gas. I couldn't shut the car off while pumping. My GF said "Only put in enough gas to get home." To which I replied "There is no such thing as a small gas station explosion."
She waited in the bathroom.

When I got home I noticed a blue SDcard looking thingie on the floor. The previous owner had a security system under the dash (I didn't know) and I had kicked out the key while taking off my wetsuit.
It started right up once I replaced the key.

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I haven't had a car break down on me. But I'm really unlucky when it comes to my toys.

I had just bought a sweet old-school bomby olympic 1969 320 model.

Decided, against everyone's recommendations to not take it on a journey. Made a few runs of the lake to be sure everything is settled in place after a full rebuild. Check the amount of gas burnt in the tank, to get a rough MPG guess, and make a plan for my trip. Leave the next day and start my mapped 100M/160K trip out to the next town. This trip is 90% bush travel, I planned on staying overnight camping. Got my rifle, camp equipment, extra gas, etc all packed up.

Get about 60K out into the bush, hit a bump. Think nothing of it. Turns out that bump was a rock that gouged a hole in the gas tank... Gravity drains the tank. So I stall out. Stupid me thinks, 'WOW, I'm making fairly good time I guess.' Fills gas tank, keeps going. 10K later, out of all my gas now... Grab the rifle, and tent start walking home.

Still, havent gone and picked up the sled. Its somewhere between Hwy11 and Hwy69 to this day...

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I only have one. Was making my 1 hour commute home from my last job on my motorcycle on a hot summer day and finally made it to the last bit of highway that's wooded and shields you from the sun a bit. I'm enjoying the ride home and get about 10 miles out from home and my bike starts to wobble funky. I didn't think too much about it and kept riding, and about 1/4 mile later the back of the bike is swerving so hard I had to put my feet on concrete at 60 mph to hold it up. I slowed down, pulled over, the the back tire was completely flat. A piece of wood off of a wood truck punctured it nicely, leaving me stuck about 9 miles from home and in one of the only places without good shade.

I got picked up about 2 hours later by a friend with a trailer. Got it home, patched the tire, kept riding. It went flat on my patch again like 1/8th of a mile from home so I took it to a tire shop and got it patched for real.

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Yes. It can rain hard enough that even windshield wipers on max can't help.

I have never seen it rain that hard from where I am from (Idaho), but in Wisconsin it happens a few times a year.

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Alright I've got 2.

First one:

I bought my current bike, 05 Kawasaki Vulcan 1500 classic with beautiful custom paint, in February some years ago. In NY that's about the best time to buy them because cheap as hell. I wanted to take the thing out of course but in western NY you can't do that because snow is a thing. So it sat there in the shed, waiting. The first day it seemed feasible to ride I took it out of the shed, fired it up, put on my cold weather gear, and headed down the road. This is probably the second or third time ever riding it, and the first time riding it for real. Well I decided to push it and headed over to some 20mph curves to see how fast I could hit them. On the old Virago I'd be able to do it at 55 or so no problem so what's the big deal? Well... that speed through the curves on a Virago was achieved in the summer, during the drought, so the roads were clean as can be. This was not summer... this was very early spring. Salt still on the road. And a Vulcan is a bit of a different animal compared to the much smaller Virago... So I hit the curve, was doing well, leaned it right down to the floorboard against the road. And still wasn't turning hard enough... so I slid off the side of the road with my brand new bike on the first actual ride scraping the paint job on the tank and front fender because I hadn't put the highway bar on yet. Sat there on the side of the road for a few minutes with a 600+lb bike on my leg before someone stopped by to help out.


Second one:

This one isn't as bad but still.

This past fall I noticed that my car needed gas. It was my first car I'd had for 6 years, 01 red pontiac grand am se. When I got it it needed a little engine work but ran like a charm. Yeah pieces of trim fell off, side skirt thing fell off when I drove over top of the ramps, door trim kept getting the door stuck so I ripped it off, dashboard was folding up. All of this over the course of owning the car. Well one day I decided to take it down to get gas because It needed it badly. So I headed off. Got out of my driveway, turned down one road, got on the main road and the car stalled. Not even a quarter mile from home. Well it turns out the fuel pump went. Decided to replace it but the plastic on the "new" pump cracked, so we patched that up, and then the other bake line went. Well by this time my grandma had bought a third car for family to use when theirs got undrivable so I decided to take my old pontiac over to the scrapyard and take ownership of the taurus until I could afford a new car (soon™). RIP pontiac. Served me well for 6 years.

Pontiac troubles
  1. Engine ran super rich when bought
  2. Door trim came off
  3. one brake line failed
  4. knock sensor failed
  5. power steering pump got sheared
  6. gear shift lever button flew out
  7. passenger side mirror fell off
  8. driver side window motor died
  9. left rear window had a rock shot through it from a lawnmower
  10. fuel pump died
  11. a/c never worked
  12. side trim fell off
  13. exhaust detached on the tail end of the cat
  14. vacuum tube tore open
  15. heater fan seized
    There might be more I'm forgetting too lol.

I was 19, in my first car (manual of course,) just coming back from a friends place and had gotten off the freeway. There was an overpass over some rail road tracks and a side road and I'm near the crest when I see that the light at the base of the over pass is red so I go to down shift from 3rd to 2nd and my clutch disc decides to grenade. That is one of several sounds I'll never forget. Being young and not incredibly knowledgeable about cars at the time I have no clue what happened, except now my clutch pedal is as useful as a wet noodle in a rain storm. Luckily for me the light changes and I use the momentum to coast through the intersection and pull over. Keep in mind this was a good thirty plus miles from any major towns or anything. What's more this was right before cell phones became ubiquitous. So I look around and there's this tiny shack of a building on the other side of the four lane road I'm on. To this day still don't remember the real name of it, but I called it "Bob's Bar" when I retold the story later and it just stuck. Figuring they have a phone I walk over open the door to the place. I walk in and there's three guys at the bar, cowboy hats and everything. I kid you not they had actual cobwebs from their hats to the bar top. The three guys and the bar tender all turn their heads in unison and look at me. I managed to squeak "I broke down, can I use the phone?" The bar tender motions to a payphone in the back. I start walking towards it and I realize he means the pay phone (because I'm old OK?) and I then realize that I don't have an coins, just bills. So I turn to the bar tender and pull out a dollar bill and ask if he can give me change. The guy looks at me like I'm trying to order a beer or something, you know that incredulous look an adult gives to a child when they ask something ridiculous. Finally he snatches the bill out of my hand and tosses me four quarters that he pulled from a cash register that looks like it was made in the late 1800's. I make my call and beat a hasty retreat out of the bar thank the bar tender who grunts a reply as I'm half way out the door. The tow truck arrived what felt like hours later and I make it home unscathed, but with a tale I still get asked to retell to this day by friends and family.

I might not remember much when I'm old a senile, but I'm going to remember Bob's Bar forever.

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This is my Dad's funniest 'Stuck on the side of the road' joke. The punchline is my motto of life.

A guy gets a flat tire on a dark and rainy night miles from nowhere, right in front of a psych hospital. I am outside in the rain watching the guy from inside the fence. He takes off the tire and puts all of the nuts in the hubcap. When he brings out the spare tire, he drops it on the hubcap. The hubcap flips all of the nuts into the air an they fall right into the storm drain.

"Oh crap! Now I'm screwed and I don't even have a cell phone to call for help." I have been watching and I suggest "Why don't you take one nut from each of the other wheels and put it on the spare tire. It should hold long enough until you can get somewhere to buy more nuts."
The guy says "That's a great idea ! If you are so smart, What are you doing in the loony bin?"

"I may be crazy, but I ain't stupid."

Words to live by.

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