Last I blogged about my car was after it blew up (due to a combination of user error and the perfect storm of life circumstances). I got the little car fixed, sort of. The brake lights now work, but you have to force the brake pedal all the way to the floor before the lights come on, so in practice, they don’t work. I figured this out once Josh got home and I followed him for 20 minutes and never once saw the brake lights come on. Thank God no one rear-ended me and praying no one rear ends him before we have time to get the car fixed for real this time.
So for the past month we’ve been squeezing 6 people into 5 seats in a car with no brake lights. And I wonder why we’ve all been a little bit stressed and crabby. In all of our free time we were looking for used cars that could seat 7. We looked online, on the base For Sale board, wrote down phone numbers as we were driving around, and would swing past the dirt lots where people parked used cars for sale to see if anything was in our budget and met our size requirements.
We found one car that looked to be an OK price, but when our mechanic checked it out he said it was overpriced because it had several major issues that needed to be fixed. The seller wasn’t interested in coming down in price, so we left that one behind. Meanwhile our mechanic found a car for us that one of his clients was selling, it was a great price and Josh and Calvin both said it looked good and ran well. (the Anyong car.) We were SO HAPPY to be finished with the process of calling strangers, meeting them in dirt lots, and test driving overpriced gross cars.
Josh and Calvin went to pick up the car from our mechanic, drove it home and the temperature gauge started registering hot. Then Calvin rolled down the window and it wouldn’t roll back up. Meanwhile the other windows wouldn’t roll down. Then it sounded really loud and rough while idling. This was all within an hour or so of picking it up. When I heard the car start and it took about 10 seconds of turning over and sounded like it was being strangled I told Josh that I was not going to drive that car and risk being stranded. He called the mechanic immediately and had him pick it up and bring it back to the shop. Anyong went Anyong. (Funny enough, it’s actually a casual way of saying both hello and goodbye in Korean.)
I immediately started looking on Bahrain’s version of Craig’s List and saw a beauty that had just been posted. A 10 year old Pajero (so the same car as my dead set of wheels), price was in the ballpark and did I mention it was pretty?
