Off And On

Just in case you noticed, I only posted once last week. I had a reason other than mere laziness or indifference, I went on a trip to Biloxi, MS with my lovely wife.We hadn't been there for almost a year and the Lincoln needed a trip. After all, it only had about a 1000 miles on it and it was begging to be taken for a ride.

The journey was almost routine, we had made it a number of times in tyhe past few years. But it turned out to have its quirks. The first was the maybe 5 mile traffic jam because a pickup truck collided with a semi just south of Gainesville. It took us about two hours to get through it, just creeping along... car length by car length... for two hours. Eventually, of course, we reached the end of the tie-up. It was smooth sailing from there until Chipley where we spent the night before moving on to Biloxi in the morning.

The Lincoln performed well throughout. As one would expect of a luxury car. Until the return trip...

The first problem was that the USB flash drive (it can play MP3 music copied to such a device) and had happily done it on the way out. On the return trip, however, it got locked into the "shuffle" mode and we could not change it easily or permanently. Each time I shut the engine down, it reverted to "shuffle" mode again on start-up. Additionally, the climate settings failed. For some unknown reason, it would not turn on the AC even after the interior got up above 72 (which I had set earlier). If I lowered it to 71, the AC would kick in but it seemed to get colder than that. Also, if I changed the teperature setting (say to 73 after I got chilly), the "auto" and the "AC" lights would go off and have to be reset. We eventually just kept one side (Faye's) set at 71 and the other at 72.

Faye will be taking the Lincoln in to the dealership this morning. Not to be outdone, my Mercedes decided to be ornery today when I went out to pick up a pizza Sunday afternoon. The MB has an "Eco" mode wherein the engine shuts off while stopped for more than a second or so and then restarts when I remove my foot from the brake. It's a nice feature that just did not work on Sunday but had worked before.

I cannot win!