Chinese New Year adventure

Over the long weekened, we drove up to our house in Melaka. We set off early morning on Saturday to avoid the usual traffic jam at the immigration border between Singapore and Malaysia. During long weekends, most Singaporeans will try to have a short getaway in Malaysia where the food and recreation is good and cheap and that means we could be stuck in a traffic jam for 2 to 3 hours if we don't get a move on as early as possible.

Throughout the 3+ hour drive, I noticed the car pick up was slightly off and told the husband I had some trouble trying to pick up speed. The husband's response was that it wasn't the car, but the driver's skill. Oookay. I said to him he would be paying for that comment soon.

And payment came in the form of the car dying on him as he drove to see one of his aunts the next day. Thank God he was not on a busy road and was only about 50 metres away from his destination. And it juuust so happen that my cousin who used to be a technical manager for one of the European car makers and now lives in Kuala Lumpur, visited his mum in Melaka and we bumped into him at my aunt's. (By now, you'd be able to guess that we have lots of relatives in Melaka. I had to get used to living to that many relatives in that area.)

My cousin took a look under the hood and his diagnosis was faulty fuel pump. And so as he was explaining to the husband the more intricate details, my eyes glazed over so I can't share with you the minute details of that discussion unfortunately - which I am sure you are just dying to know.

So the bottomline is, we had no car to zip around Melaka in, and the bigger problem was trying to work out what to do with the car (being the Chinese New Year holiday, most workshops were closed) and how do we get home.

After hours of exploring the options, the husband decided the car will be towed 3 hours back to Singapore and made arrangements for a van to transport the rest of us home while he takes the tow truck. All very exciting for the kids at this point.

Alas, we couldn't hire a van as most were booked for the - altogether now - the Chinese New Year holiday. But we managed to book a pickup truck and so my 3 kids, my helper, my mum and I squeezed into this nice truck. The kids were thrilled at the prospect of riding a *truck*, but lost the enthusiasm soon after they realised we were going to be packed like sardine in it.

Please don't ask how much the tow truck and the pickup truck cost us. It cost us way too much but the priority was getting the family and the car safely home. And we did get home safely and the car is sitting at the authorised workshop waiting to be worked on when the it re-opens later this week, after the - you've guessed it - Chinese New Year holiday.