Thanks so much for the posts about me being able to make it to the show after all, you girls rock.
As it turned out, what was going on with my car wasn't that big of a deal, and nothing I had to see to immediately...but I didn't know that at the time, the "symptoms" it was showing could have pointed to something very, very bad. And with the sort of luck I've been having lately, I didn't want to tempt fate and blow out the motor.
Boring car talk, skip if you're not interested:
I discovered two problems. One, when I was driving, the temperature was mostly fine, but when it was idling, like, at a long stop light, the temperature would go way up, but then after I started driving again, it would slowly drop back to normal. Also, when the temperature went up, warm air was blowing into the vents in the car, even though it was set to cool (not a/c, though). Then Saturday night when I got home from my errands, I noticed a big patch in my driveway where it looked like some sort of fluid had leaked. As I'm sure you all know, overheating a car is very, very bad, and all I could think of was driving in this heat on the 400 highways going 130 kmh/nearly 80 mph, and having the car overheat and the engine blow.
When checking this out with my ex Sunday, we also discovered that my transmission fluid was low. My car had also been showing some minor symptoms of transmission probs that scared the crap out of me, because fixing that can cost thousands.
Through trial and error and checking fluid levels and seeing if any more leaked out after they were filled and after the car was taken for a couple of good drives, my ex helped me determine that the transmission leak is a very slow one, and putting the fluid in made the transmission problems go away immediately. This is very good news, because that means the transmission itself is not damaged, I just need to check the levels from time to time, and put more in as needed.
As for the overheating, my ex noticed that the rad fans weren't coming on, and figured that was the problem, since there didn't seem to be a rad leak. Later Sunday I was looking up the problem online, and it said a way to test your fans is to see if they come on while you have the a/c on. I did that, and they did come on. For some reason, they're not coming on when the a/c isn't on, so that's not normal, but as long as I keep the a/c on, it's fine. That's not a permanent fix by any means, but at least I can drive it in the heat without worrying about overheating now. And when the air temp is cooler, it doesn't heat up that much, anyway, it's only on very hot days (which it has been lately) that it happens.
I also called my mechanic first thing Monday morning and told him about it. He didn't seem to think the heating up while idling was that big of a deal in this weather. I was actually supposed to take the car into him this morning so he could check it, but then after it got to Burlington and back fine, I cancelled.
So, if all this had happened a few days before it did, and I'd had time to figure it out, I could have driven to get the Go Train no problem. But as things stood at the time, I couldn't take the chance until I knew. Just sucks that all this came up the evening before I was supposed to leave.