pmsumner

Yesterday as I was pulling off from the Daresbury Park roundabout, eager to be home, I sped up onto the A56 as usual, overtaking some slowcoach in the inside lane, as usual, only to find as I hit about 50mph that there had a rather unpleasant and grindy crunchy sort of lumpy noise with bumps, coming from my rear passenger side wheel.

Of course, this isn't a natural noise for a car to be making, so I pulled over to the inside lane as quickly as possible, stuck on my hazards and stopped. The handbrake felt like it was pushing against wheels made of jelly.

I got out and checked for the obvious, a flat, though the noise was all wrong. A flat (in my experience) sounds more "flumplycrumple", and this was definite "grindybumpy". It wasn't. I got back in and thought about moving off again, making an experimental move at very low speed. After all - I was still in the inside lane of the dual carriageway at rush hour. The noise continued. I sulked.

I moved the car veerrrryyy slowly to the nearest turn off which _luckily_ was only about 50 metres away, it was 50 metres of the most unpleasant driving I've ever done, my poor girl was in pain! There, I called Green Flag. I was assisted within 25 minutes of the call, which I was really impressed by! The guy jacked up the rear, checked the handbrake was on and tried to move the wheel round. It moved, despite the handbrake being on tight. He put the car on the truck and brought me home.

Sounds like brake discs/pads have broken - not really good news. Not that bad either, in the long run, as it will be relatively cheap to fix. That's arranged for Friday, with Green Flag coming to me to pick the car up, and the garage coming to drop the car off at home! Nice one.

Getting to and from work is.... interesting. Getting there is easy enough - the 0905 from Warrington arrives at Daresbury park-ish about 0925, but getting home - the last bus home being at 1730 is utter crap.