Wednesday, 06. August 2014 (Day 5)
Good morning. - Of course I was up early. The usual.
Cool road, and no traffic, hm...
...oh yes, I went for a superb morning hoon for about half an hour. Awesome road on top of that hill.
When I came back it was time for breakfast, and afterwards the usual car tinkering and Roadtrip-stickering went on.
And off we went. Parts of the Transalpina Road were on the plan for today.
And the roads to get there were already great:
Look at these gas guzzlers.
And now look at the economical ones. *Cough*
Welcome to Romania! :lol:
But the accumulated dust from that gravel section soon got washed off again...
Nevertheless, great driving stuff:
And here my unlucky stride began, notice at 5:45 I'm backing off going after the 850, because I suddenly heard some strange noise. What the heck was that?
Anyway, short photo stop at a dam. And yep, I was in denial mode about the car. Didn't even look under the hood.
Beni sure knows how to pose :lol:
Looked almost like somewhere in Japan...
Also some cool lake there, you couldn't actually see where the shore was.
Some tourist from Finland wanted a shot of him infront of that vista. Done.
Classic FG :lol:
On we went, but the tarmac lasted about 100 meters...
The following section was quite slow because of the worsening road condition. Nevertheless, my strange noise suddenly had quite some presence now. But from the inside of the car I couldn't even locate the noise, to me it sounded like I was blowing ceramic parts of my catalysator trough the exhaust.
- So we stopped again at another dam, and it was time to finally have a look under the hood. - Oh-oh. 1/3 of the belt gone. -
Liga's comment while having a look too: "If that fully snaps, you're complete and utterly fucked." - Well, thank you very much for that information, Madam. :lol:
But anyway, the scenery was great.
And altough we would have dinner in a Restaurant just a few minutes down the road, the brits and some others still went for some er, snacks. :lol:
After dinner parts of the road became very adventurous.
In these sections everybody had to search for his personal best (read: lowest pothole count) lane.
Nice wide road. Just no tarmac yet.
Go-go Suzuki!
Not the fastest anymore, eh 850? :lol:
The road was by now a constant mix of tarmac- and gravel sections. Great stuff.
At 7:00 we all tought for a moment the road had ended. :lol: - Btw, meanwhile the belt noise was gone. - But only for some time until the shredding started again with the next section of its width.
And for sure, at the next stopp: Only 1/3 of it was still there. Ouch.
At least I wasn't the only one with the hood up. For them it was just for cooling reasons, tough.
So after that visual check it was clear the belt would go off at any minute now. Atleast since the road went all downwards from here I could take some stress off the motor, but to no avail: A few kilometers down the road the belt finally went, and my dashboard display showed "STOP" in big red letters. Ah, crap. - But the belt only fell off, it was still in one piece, so
Maytum,
Davetouch and
Beni mounted the belt on again. Awesome guys. - The brits even had a spare belt with them, but it was way to long for the Laguna. - Myself, I was quite unhappy causing these troubles, so I even forgot to take pictures for some time.
But my bad luck wasn't over yet. With the belt mounted again it took only a few kilometers more until I was hitting the next problem. Yes, literaly hitting it:
The other guy:
Yes, then and there I finally popped my crashing cherry. Granted it wasn't a big one and at a very slow speed: I came down trough the inside of a hairpin, the Dacia came upwards, and we met in the middle. Crunch. - Sadly my own dashcam was off (less electric use, less strain on the belt) but at least
Gallanti behind me had his one running. I'm sure he will post it in this thread sometimes. - The paperwork was no big hassle since
tquattro was there for translations, it only was a bit time consuming because we had to make a copy somewhere of my car papers to hand over to the other guy. A hotel lobby a bit further down the road gladly helped. Done. - But wait, the problems weren't over, since right after the crash the belt was finally gone, and now I just drove on without it. Without any steering- and braking assistance.
Eye-Q was surprisingly still willing to be my passenger. Brave man. - Gladly the Laguna's cooling system isn't on the belt that went, so all I did whilst driving on was to strain the battery.
Adrian had a spare one in the 850, but mine was quite new and held on until we reached a larger intersection with Restaurants.
We took dinner there....
...and
tquattro organised a flatbed truck to get my car to a garage in Sibiu.
Was quite the adventure. - More to come, stay tuned.