We were taking Lauren to a car show in Ephrata (not far from Lancaster) that we'd been invited to. Got about ten miles out and started to hit very heavy and slow traffic, even for Friday evening. Temperatures started to climb, engine started to labor—not good.

At about 14 miles, she stalled. Hard start, stall. Hard start, stall. Then—no start. A nice young man in a Subaru wagon pushed us off the road into a convenient parking lot—and refused to take any money.

I let the engine cool down a little and tried to start it again. No start, just ugly bangs from the engine—could be backfire, could be something else.

In the battle of Hagerty versus AAA road service, AAA won. A flatbed with a competent, personable driver showed up within 35 minutes. Lauren looked achingly beautiful in the gathering darkness as he loaded her up. We took her to County Corvette in West Chester, PA, only 8 miles away. They have instructions to figure out what is wrong (perhaps today) and then I'll figure out what I'm going to do.

I was a mess—Ivelis was, of course, wonderful. We ended up doing about half of the things we had planned for the weekend, but we drove Grace.

At this point, I'm not inconsolable; I'm more of a combination of angry and sad. The reality for me is that I don't do garage queens—I want to drive the car. I'm not asking for it to be as reliable as Grace or Louis, but, if I can't count on this car to do a couple of a hundred miles for a weekend trip, then I'll find a car that can.

They worked on it for a good part of the day, mostly trying to replicate the condition. The early but not definite diagnosis is fuel pump.

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The engine had been sitting for almost three days (they pushed it inside on Saturday morning), so I'm not surprised they managed to get it to at least (very) cold start. Cold start has been the best start on that car for as long as I have owned it.

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I picked Lauren up this afternoon (we have been way out of town in Louis on a "Popecation" since Friday morning). County Corvette checked a bunch of things (ignition, spark plugs, injectors, gas tank, etc.), but narrowed it down to fuel pump.

A couple of observations when driving the car home today:

1) When in drive and at a stop, the tach moved around by no more than 200 RPM. Before, it would lope up and down a range of about 800 RPM.

2) The engine gets so quiet at idle/near idle that there were a few times I thought it had shut off.

3) I accelerated slowly to about 35 mph (the transmission shifts a couple times and leaves RPMs at about 900) and hammered it. In the past, this has consistently yielded a bunch of chugging, knocking, and then a Check Engine code. Today, it simply yielded steadily increasing RPMs and speed (perhaps as designed? ).