adrian is rad

After disconnecting my battery to do the starter replacement that I’ve mentioned before on my blog (and that I’m not going to link, because, honestly, who’s going to want to read me writing about replacing my starter), my radio went into “SAFE” mode, an anti-theft thing to prevent it from being stolen, or, rather, being used, if it’s stolen. Easy to fix if you have the correct code to unlock the device.

I, however, did not. The code I had was wrong. I tried many times (which is a pain, because you need to leave the radio on for an hour between every two tries and considering I almost never drive for an hour straight, that’s difficutl.) I went to the dealership* yesterday and they pulled out the radio, found the serial number and the VIN number (on the body of the car, not on the radio) and looked up the correct code, which is not even close to the code I’d been entering.

As it turns out, driving without music sucks. A couple times, I took out my laptop and put it on the passenger seat and played music from that. So much for silence.

Which reminds me of a time when I was living in Germany. Sam Breuning and I went to the Vienne Jazz Festival (an entirely different story), about a seven hour drive from Stuttgart, most of it through southern and eastern France, passing through Lyon and going a little past. I didn’t have a tape adapter for my car so I couldn’t play any of my CDs and as it turns out, French radio is horrible. My next road trip, down to Stein-am-Rhein, Switzerland skirting the Schwartzwald and hitting Rothenberg o.d. Tauber on the way back, I bought a tape adapter and brought hundreds of CDs.

*I link because they did it while I waited, were nice about it and didn’t charge for which another not-so-nice VW dealer was going to charge $60.