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Tell Mama’s Toronto tour stops traffic
Apr 13th, 2009 by shelley
Well, any of you who use twitter or facebook already know that Tell Mama had quite an experience this last week during our brief Toronto tour. For those of you who don’t tune in to those touted social media transcripts, here’s what went down…
Half an hour out of Perth with Franc, his son Marcel and all of our related gear crammed into my little 1992 Honda Civic, our muffler falls apart. Not tragic but not exactly a joy ride for poor Marcel in the back seat! Franc’s car which is the same year and make did exactly the same thing to him last week.
So, we get into Toronto at 5:30pm (that’s rush hour for all you country folk 
) and take the Don Valley Parkway to Dupont and Bathurst so we can drop Marcel off at home on our way to Kensington Market. When all of a sudden we’ve dropped six inches and we’re dragging the underside of my car along the pavement – cue grind to a halt. Why I even tried to shift into first gear and pull over to the side is beyond me – geez, I wonder why we aren’t moving anywhere.
We get out of the car and take a look at the front left tire which is sitting independent of the rest and perpendicular to the vehicle. Ok, here’s where I probably will screw up the lingo – the CV boot joint fell apart disengaging the drive shaft from the tire and dropping the whole front left of the vehilce onto the pavement. What would have happened if we were on the highway! I am so thankful that we weren’t and also that I had two competent, thoughtful guys with me.
All the cars behind us were pretty pissed off that we had the gall to break down during their drive home and they weren’t too impressed that they had to drive around us during rush hour to get going on their way. One guy who was driving toward us from the other direction slowed down, rolled down his window to tell us “hey, your car is broken, I’m a mechanic, I know these things”. Well, thanks for that Mr. Wonderful, I’m so glad that a mechanic stopped to tell me what I already knew.
The rest, in a nutshell, goes like this: I call my in-laws in Lanark cause they’re my goto people for car trouble (I know, why would I do that…I wanted to know if they had a CAA card), Franc pulls out his CAA card (I guess I could have asked him first), they come and tow us to a garage at King and Strachan where they charge me $85 to tell me that it’s not worth fixing. I’m pretty sure that’s what I told them when we dragged ourselves in there. In the meantime, I call Brian to ask him to meet us at the scene of the wreck which he did but by the time he got there we were ten minutes away again. Without one single complaint he drove his gas-guzzling Marquis down to King and Strachan to rescue us – gotta love that guy, and the gg Marquis which I always give him hell for driving (until now that is ).
This gigs at The Supermarket and Statler’s were both excellent and Brian managed to shove all of our gear and us into his car and get us all back to Perth safely.
We met some cool people at our gigs and re-connected with Peter Kadar who joined us at Statler’s but maybe I’ll tell you more about that in another post.
Happy Easter!