A few minutes after getting propane, our navigator directed us across the freeway we were supposed to turn onto and into a hilly suburb. Our transmission had been acting a bit squirrelly, but on one of the hills it completely gave out! As we used gravity to back over to the side of the road, we could observe a giant pool of van blood on the road. NOT GOOD!
So after a lot of phone calls to Coach.Net, transmission shops, and tow-truck operators, we finally had the van towed to the only transmission shop that answered their phone on a Saturday and took MARTA home, fearing a $1500 transmission rebuild was in our near future.
Luckily, the problem turned out to only be our 25 year old transmission coolant line which had broken open. As it turns out, transmission fluid is necessary for the proper operation of a not-so-modern drive-train. A new coolant line, a few new seals and gaskets, a filter and new transmission fluid (plus labor, mostly labor) wasn’t cheap, but it was much better than we were expecting!