Car glitch

So, earlier I was talking about the trip we took to Southern Utah. Well, it wasn't without incident--can't my trips go without a major setback? So the story goes as follows:

We started the trip out at around 1:30pm. We didn't have to be there until around 5pm so we were thinking of taking the scenic byway and enjoying some stops (considering it was one of the few weekends that I would have Jakob before his show). Right before the exit to the scenic byway I started noticing that my car would lurch every once in a while, so I clicked off the A/C and after discussing it with Jakob we decided to stay on the main interstate as an "in case" scenario. We're happy that we did because about an hour into the trip the Check Engine light came on and every time the car tried to accelerate, the RPM would go up but the car would slow down. We got off at the nearest town (Fillmore) and tried to find a mechanic to talk to. We found one, but he took one look at my car and said it was 'too new' and he didn't have the right equipment to figure out what was wrong and the guy in town who did was closed for the day. (Closed? at 2:30pm on a Saturday? Yeesh, small towns). He told us to continue down to the next town after letting the car sit for an hour or so to cool down. So we let it sit for about 30 minutes because I wasn't sure if the car would accelerate and we had to take it super slow in order to get it anywhere.

So off we were again to the next town which was about 50 miles south. The car again didn't accelerate when called upon so we had to gently get it up to 60, turn the cruise control on and use the hand accelerator. It still had issues but at least I got up to somewhat interstate speeds. Unfortunately the speed in that area is 75-80, so I was going 65-70. Yep I was the slow grandma in the right-hand lane. Took us twice the amount of time to get to the next town (Beaver) because of it. When we pulled into Beaver, we looked for the mechanic that the first guy had told us to and when we did, he didn't look happy to see us. There wasn't a greeting or anything. In fact he looked like we were disturbing him. Anyway, I let Jakob deal with him on almost anything and I answered the questions about the car when Jakob couldn't. The guy took one look at it and said that my car was 'too old' for him to look at because he had just replaced the sensor hookup for his equipment. (By the way, my truck is a '95.5. Since when is that old? It's 15 years only and I just barely broke 100,000 miles. My yellow Oldsmobile is a '86 and it only has 87,000 on the original engine). Anyway, after staying there for another hour, I called a friend who was coming down as well and asked where they were. Luckily enough they weren't far behind, so after the "mechanic" saying that since the car was still working to just continue on and ignore the check engine light (I'm never going back to him) we continued on. When the turn-off came, there were 2 vans that had pulled behind us and then pulled in front--yep, it was the friend and their caravan. We were the caboose the rest of the way there and it was not fun.

When we finally got to the location, we ended up leaving the car and seeing if a long rest would do it some good. We were planning on coming back after the event that evening, but we ended up staying the night. We took off the next morning and here's the kicker: there was no problem on the way back. None. We were fine the rest of the way. We had my mechanic look at it once we got it back into town and he kept it for the day running every test he could think of and there was nothing in the computer's history codes that suggest anything went wrong. My guess is that my truck was throwing a tantrum because it didn't want to go down south and it knew we were coming back up so it ran smooth.

Ugg! I had to drive up to Ogden the next few days after that for some teacher's workshops and there was nothing wrong with it. It didn't give me one symptom. I really think that my truck has a mind of it's own. And what's even worse was the guy in Beaver suggested to me to "get a newer truck, one that I could handle". Yep, never going back to that guy again.