i had SO MANY CAR TROUBLES while waiting for this one to come in.

i was driving the saturn (made in 1994) from cynicalscribe‘s place to umbc one saturday so i could get some schoolwork done. i was on route 32, merged on to 95 north, and downshifted… started to shift back up to 5th gear while merging back on to 95 and then the car acted like it DOWNSHIFTED and the gearshift just started wobbling around freely. i think the car was stuck in 4th. i managed to get off at the first exit, but as i’m going on the exit ramp i see a sign that there’s a stoplight ahead. i didn’t even know if i could get the car started again from a stop in 4th gear, but let me tell you that it is possible. the route i was on started taking me back to cynicalscribe‘s, so i figured i’d just take the car back there and then figure out what to do, but then i reasoned that it was running at least so i might as well just take it the 30 miles back to annapolis.

so i get back on route 32 headed back toward annapolis when i hear the college football scores on the radio… “GREAT, i think there’s a home game today!”, and being across the street from the navy football stadium isn’t going to help me in my current condition. i switched the radio to 1430 WNAV and i hear the sounds typically made when there’s a navy touchdown (a sort of foghorn noise and a cannon boom). i call home and ask dad if there’s a home game, and he says yes but that there wasn’t any traffic at the moment, so i described the problem to him and figured that i’d just have to take a back route into the neighborhood and figured that i’d have to navigate around all these parked cars, and since it was gameday there wasn’t going to be any street parking in front of the house.

dad called me back as i got near to annapolis and asked me where i was, so this way he was able to go down to the street corner by our house and move the wooden sawhorse that the police put up to try to keep people out of the neighborhoods and to keep visitors from exiting onto one of the main arteries into the stadium. at least this way i didn’t have to navigate through the neighborhood. i managed to get the car halfway up the driveway (which is steep) in 4th gear, but it didn’t want to go any farther so dad had to push it up the rest of the way. he looked at it a few weeks later and thinks it’s something with the linkage for the gearshift, but that saturn has had it.

(there’s also a story about how a few days before, i was stuck in stop-and-go traffic with the car almost about to overheat and the low oil light flashing at me, that was fun too.)

so since the saturn was out of commission, i started driving a 1995 nissan maxima that we got from my aunt and uncle. that was driving ok, but dad had said that the shocks on the nissan were pretty awful, even worse than the saturn’s. it wobbled a lot going over bumps, and if i hit a pothole when going around a turn then it started to fishtail a little, but otherwise (otherwise! yeah, except for the fishtailing when hitting bumps!) it was fine.

then almost two weeks ago cynicalscribe, bruno_boy, festive and i were in the nissan, and zenmetsu and kat were following behind us in dan’s MINI when we hear the car making a weird sound (as carrie described it: “it sounds like one of the podracers in star wars!”). so i pull off to the shoulder and check and the rear passenger tire is a little low on air, but we’re going to a gas station that’s not that much further away anyway (a mile away at the most) so we can look at it in better detail up there and fill it with air or change the tire. so we start going again and we don’t get further than another 1/10th or 2/10ths of a mile when kat calls dave and says “um, you better stop now because that tire is smoldering.” so we stop and get out and the tread is starting to separate from the tire! well, i get out the spare and i get out the tire iron and we’re messing with some flares we found in the back that were wrapped up in bubble tape and impossible to open and impossible to read the directions so we put them away before we cause any further harm, and i can’t find the jack. i get three other people to look, and nobody sees it. so we’ve got a spare, a tire iron, and no jack.

i figure i might as well call AAA and dan says that it’d take them about an hour to show up, and kat has a jack in her car, so they go back to dan’s place to get the jack from her car and bring it back, but that’s about a 15-20 minute trip each way. just after they left, carrie was on the phone with her parents since they live much closer and they say that not all jacks work in all cars, so i figure i might as well just call AAA then instead of waiting to find out the jack doesn’t fit. carrie and dave hike up the rest of the way to the gas station to see if they can either get a jack there, or if the police officers who usually hang out there can park behind us to indicate that there’s a broken-down car in the right lane of this two-lane road, and festive hangs out with me while i get AAA on the phone. i tell them what’s happening and they say “ok, well we want our members to get back on the road as soon as possible, so we put you on the priority list. it’s 9:32 now, so by 10:02 someone should be there.” and someone shows up in 16 MINUTES. i can’t even get a pizza that fast. so i call dan and text carrie and they all head towards carrie’s place to wait there.

anyway, so the tire gets fixed, and the next day i tell dad about it and we go looking in the car and he finds it hidden away behind an access panel in the trunk and not where the spare tire was like we were expecting it to be. oh well… in all the other cars when i’ve looked back there it was just wiring and no jack, so when it didn’t want to open for me i figured that i might as well just not bother.

then late last week i was driving to work and the car stalls when i’m stopped at the stoplight leaving the neighborhood. i couldn’t tell if perhaps i had lifted my foot off the clutch just enough to get it to stall or what, but then that night on my way home from work i was stopped and waiting to pull out of a gas station next to my office when the car stalls again and this time i KNEW i didn’t move my foot. then again on monday, i was getting ready for work and running a little late but not too bad, and it stalled at the stoplight leaving the neighborhood as soon as the light turned green. ARGH. so i turned on my flashers so the guy behind me wouldn’t start getting upset and tried restarting the car, and it wasn’t until the light had changed back to red and the guy had pulled from behind me to next to me that the car started back up again. but before the light could change to green someone else had pulled behind me and the car stalled again, so i circled around and went back home and sent my managers an email that i’d be using sick time that day (since i figured i could try to pick up the MINI that day and still be able to make it to shady grove for my teacher’s assistant gig since i wasn’t going to drive the nissan anywhere in this condition).

well, after talking with my salesperson at the dealership about what was going on and what they needed to do to get the car ready, he called me about an hour before the dealership closed to say that we’ll be able to do the delivery on tuesday. in the meantime i had checked the oil in the nissan (a little low, but not bad, so i added a quart) and figured that i’d drive it to work and then pick the MINI up after work. well i told the parents about that idea and they said that it wasn’t that good of an idea because if the car stalled on my way to work or my way back home then i’d be stuck, so we decided to see if i could pick the car up early on tuesday and then i’d just head into the office for the second half of the day.

i woke up tuesday morning with a killer headache and decided to just take the whole day off instead of guessing about when it’d be ready for me to pick up. called my salesman at the dealership and told him that i’d be ready to pick it up whenever instead of at 5:30 like we originally planned, so he said that i could come by at 4 and get it then.

we did some yardwork that afternoon and while we were raking leaves i just started thinking about how 90% of the driving that mom does is taking anne to and from school in this minivan we have, so it’s not very efficient and if the saturn and the nissan are busted anyway (and both stickshifts which mom does not want to drive in this area’s traffic) then what if we traded those in towards a new MINI? so i mentioned to mom about it since MINI is doing some good financing deals right now, then dad took the nissan to the local garage to get checked out (i followed him in the minivan), and then we all went to the dealership. while i took care of my financial paperwork, mom and dad talked with my salesguy about maybe getting a MINI cooper (non-s, minimal options) and what the pricing would be for no money down and stuff like that. at least if they went that way then they can use the MINI to teach anne how to drive since she still has her learner’s (well, her learner’s expired, actually, but this way she can practice driving on an automatic and won’t need to learn about stickshift until she has experience actually driving), and mom can use it for driving anne to and from school until anne has to go to college, and then either we keep using that car around here or maybe send it off to college with anne since by that point it’ll be more of a used car and less of a new car.

so my car is all set except for a few things; i ordered a new gps but apparently nobody has it in stock anywhere, so they still had my old gps at the dealership so they just gave that back to me and just need to order the mounting bracket and install that in the car. i also ordered sport stripes to be installed, and i thought that was a dealer-install option but they said that they weren’t installed at the factory or at the vehicle distribution center in new jersey so they’ll just install that for free for me, and when i get those installed either i’ll wait on a saturday for them or drop it off on a weeknight and will probably get my old MINI back as a loaner. i also couldn’t make up my mind if i wanted carpet floor mats or rubber floor mats… i kept the carpet ones from my previous MINI, but it would be nice to have fresh ones… then again, it’s wintertime and the rubber mats would be good for the slush and mud and such. lucky for me i didn’t need to choose since the carpet mats are on backorder too, so i just got the rubber ones instead. i’ll see how i feel about my carpet mats after winter, if i want to order new ones or just put my old ones back in there.

and do you want to know what’s awesome? well, i traded my ’08 MINI in since the money i got for it was enough to pay off my auto loan, pay off a credit card, and still start a downpayment on this new MINI. i did some math on the auto loan and credit card, and i ended up saving about $7000 in interest by getting out of those early! this new auto loan of 2.9% is so much better, and it’s 5 years instead of 6, and only extends the time i’m paying a car note for only about 4 months longer than if i had stayed with the previous auto loan.

oh yeah, so i had to buy a replacement tire for the busted one this past weekend, and dad took the nissan to the garage on tuesday to be checked out. they got back to him today, it needs $2000 worth of work to fix it up (new struts, brakes, etc.). so, it’s looking more and more likely that we’ll just try trading in both the nissan and the saturn for $2000 total and just use that towards a new MINI.