So I've stopped driving it at this point until I figure out whats going on, but the gist of it is, is that coolant is practically POURING from somewhere behind the back left side of my engine block (if your facing the front of the car), there's suddenly rust in my coolant coming up in the radiator, and when it over-heats, it peaks past the redline and goes back to normal when it shifts into next gear, then steadily climbs back up again. This repeats until after a bit of driving it just stays peaked past the red-line. Does anyone have any idea whats goin on here?

I drive a 96' Camry LE four door, with a 4 cylinder 2.2L engine if that helps anything.

 

get your car up on jack stands high enough to inspect the freeze out plugs and inspect all the cooling system hoses behind the intake manifold . sounds like it was driven to hot for to long don't be surprise if the head gasket it's blown , when coolant system it's empty the temperature shown on dash it's inaccurate because the coolant temp. sensor reads of the steam build in the system . stop driving it for your own good $$$$...

 

Probably. It started getting hot when I was the asscrack of louisiana, and i had to drive it back to texas because it was my only option, other than thumbing it.

 

bad thing always happen when you are away from home ,i bean there too .before going crazy fixing it ,check for oil/coolant mix . pull the oil cap and check for milky residues and do the same at the radiator cap , make sure engine it's cold

 

will do

 

sounds like engine freeze plug... it not easy to change and best left to shops..
Problem is access to get to it and then pray it comes out without plug frozen in there.

But rust water problem seems like it could be waterpump problem if there was enough coolant in the system. I would flush all the coolant and put new coolant in there and see if it still overheats... If it still overheats, then try thermostat replacement--cheap cost....before doing waterpump....

but it would all depend on when your timing belt/waterpump was replaced.

either way, looking at big $$$ expense