Driving Backwards is Illegal?!?

Today's post is courtesy of a "Florida Man" story...

Once upon a time, a hypothetical situation may or may not have occurred.  For the purpose of the narrative, I will share this hypothetical situation as if it actually happened.

Back in the very early aughts, wife 1.0 and I both worked downtown.  Our respective offices were on the same block, and just a few miles from home.  One particular day, she called me up and asked me to help her out with a car problem.

To make the story significantly shorter, I learned that her Dodge Grand Caravan was having transmission problems.  Reverse worked okay, but the transmission slipped horribly going forward.  Being the problem solver that I am, I sent her home in my car and drove the van home in reverse.

I plotted a course that would get me home with as many back roads as possible, with as few turns as possible, and then waited for the worst of rush hour to pass.  Driving backwards through downtown was pretty amusing.  While I didn't see the facial expressions of commuters and pedestrians for the most part, it was kind of comical when I came to a stop light.  This was before the days of back-up cameras, so I had to drive with my arm over the passenger seat and my neck craned so I could look out the back window.  Stop lights gave me a moment of reprieve, where I could release from that pose and look forward.  But in this instance, looking forward meant that I was directly facing the car immediately behind... er... in front of... me... er... I mean my windshield.  It was always a bit awkward looking directly into the windshield of the next vehicle.  They were inevitably quite confused.  Using the rear view mirror, I'd keep an eye on traffic, and when it was my turn to go, I'd prop my arm back over the passenger seat, turn my head to the back window of the vehicle and proceed on my journey.

Fun fact: cars don't like to go backwards at road speeds for extended periods of time.  I learned this the hard way.  The biggest problem is keeping the engine cool.  The cooling system relies on air freely flowing through the radiator, which, of course, is immediately in front of the engine.  The cooling process is severely undermined when traveling in reverse.  My office at the time was three miles from my house.  The van overheated at mile 1 and I had to pull over and turn the car off to let the engine cool down.

After shutting off the engine, I could clearly hear the coolant boiling.  It sounded a lot like water rapidly boiling in a pan on the stove, only amplified.  The boiling sound subsided in about five minutes, and I waited another ten minutes or so... long enough for the engine to cool significantly, but not enough to cool completely.

I continued driving in reverse for another half mile, at which point the rest of the drive was hilly, but primarily downhill.  I backed into a driveway with a steep uphill incline, waited for traffic to clear, tromped on the gas and continued my journey home, no longer driving backwards.  While the transmission was slipping horribly going forward, it did catch ever so slightly.  Between the slight transmission engagement and the steep slope of that driveway to the street, I got up to speed enough to get home.  It was very much a practical application of gravity.  I picked up speed going down hills, and quickly lost speed on the inclines.  There were about four hills between that driveway and my house.

All said and done, it took me about 30 minutes to drive that 3 miles home.  But I was proud of my ingenuity in getting the car home, and it gave me a story that I still tell, 20+ years later.

Again though, just in case the man is reading this blog post, this is a hypothetical story that may or may not have occurred.