I'm pretty sure I can't adequately chronicle all that has been going on with our cars over the past month. If we focused solely on that (which, I admit, we have at times), we could get pretty doggone discouraged...
In August, you may recall, we had to have the good ol' Aztek towed out of the garage and into town to have the ignition replaced. We also had 4 new tires put on, as many people had reminded us upon seeing them that we were in great need. That little adventure all cost us over $1000.
Then, two weeks later, I was on my way to church with the kids on Sunday morning, and the coolant indicator light came on and an alarm started dinging. I called Jeremy, who had me shut the car off immediately when I realized (upon his asking) that the gauge showed all the way over on "HOT." Not a good feeling. We were able to get it to the repair shop, and a long list of things (including every particular type of gasket there apparently is) was repaired to the tune of $1400.
Of course, during these past several weeks, we have had to beg rides, borrow and rent cars, or stay home when we needed to be somewhere many times. It's been an adventure.
So, when we went to Indiana a couple weeks ago, the day after we got the Aztek back from it's repairs, we made it there just fine and dandy--all 250 miles. Yay! No lights, no dinging, nothing scary. Until...I went to take the kids to G'pa and G'ma Lopshire's house and got about 2 miles into the trip and the same thing happened--the coolant light and the alarm went off!!!!!
Ugh!!! We felt like pulling our hair out. But, the decision was made to leave the Aztek there to be fixed (rather than try to make it all the way home and possibly get stranded or overheated somewhere along the way!) and borrow my Dad's car. He and Mom were planning to visit us soon, and they would just take the Aztek to their trusted car guy and bring it back when they came to visit us...
So, Dad's car guy checked it out and was really angry to find that our shop here had not done a thorough or adequate job (We'd kinda guessed by this time.), and that it would cost another $1600 to repair it. He also advised that the repairs wouldn't last 2 years (what we were hoping to get out of the Aztek) and wouldn't be worth doing. Wow. Now we need a "new" car, and we pretty much flushed about $2400 we didn't have down the toilet in the past few weeks. Not a great feeling, to say the least.
So, Dad's car guy buddy, Ray, was so upset about what our car repair shop did to us (or rather, charged for and didn't do), that he offered to give us that $1400 we put towards our last repairs on the Aztek toward a car like my dad's that he had on his lot. We were surprised by such a generous offer, and after doing some research here locally, we decided it was the best way for us to go.
Dad made several trips to Ray's to talk about our situation with the cars, and brought the car (a 2002 Toyota Avalon) home to give it a good look-over. He and Mom found everything they could see and sent us a bunch of pictures of a few tiny cosmetic problems, just so we would know exactly what we were considering.
We felt the cosmetic things weren't big issues, and Dad worked with Ray about fixing a few other concerns before we made everything official. Jeremy took care of the loan and title and tax stuff, and Mom and Dad brought the car to us when they came yesterday.
(Just to add to the apparently now never-ending saga of our car troubles, Jeremy and Annah went to get in his car to go to the football game last night when Mom and Dad were about an hour away from our house with our "new" car. Jeremy's car wouldn't start. Seriously!! We aren't sure what's going to happen there, but we need it to last at least another year! These are the days of praying for our cars, I guess. It feels so greedy and selfish that we have two, but we are limited from a lot volunteer and good activities if we have only one.)
Anyway, we have loved driving Dad's Avalon the past two weeks and are happy to have this nice car now. It feels pretty luxurious with its heated leather seats, even though it is 10 years old. We hope it will last at least 5 years until we have its loan paid off!
Wonder if we should name it?
No comments:
Post a Comment