Car Issues

I said I'd come back last Sunday and write about all of our problems we'd had that week. Obviously I never got around to it! Things have been so busy with packing and getting house stuff done that I spend almost no time on the computer these days!

Anyway, about 10 days ago, when Tropical Storm Erin came ashore and drenched Houston with rain, a lot of areas were impassable on the roads. Dean works on the east side of town, where most of the afternoon rain fell. So when it was time for him to come home, he looked on the traffic map and saw that the main highway that he usually takes was almost at a standstill for miles. So he thought he'd go a roundabout way to get home. He drove through a couple of high points and the car (our VW Passat) did fine. But then he reached another high point and the car stalled out. He pushed it onto the side of the road (where other cars were sitting as well). Well, it never restarted, so he finally flagged down a tow truck to bring him home.

The tow truck driver told him that he thought the dealership would total the car out. I had never considered that.....how can a car be totaled if there's no water inside, and it was never more than 8 inches high?? But if it WAS totaled, that would have been very bad news for us.....the car is less than 4 years old, and we paid it off last summer. When we paid it off, we took off the comprehensive insurance (thinking at the time, "what's the likelyhood that our car would be stuck in a flood or catch on fire?"). So.....I pictured us towing our (fully paid-off, and only 4-year old) car to the junkyard and not getting a penny for it! AAHH! And on top of that, trying to buy a house at the same time!

Well, it ended up not being nearly so bad. The dealership quoted us around $2500 to fix everything, which sounded wonderful to me (it's all a matter of expectations!). Since this was about the amount that we were planning on spending this fall for a big-screen TV, Dean agreed that it would be best to wait on the TV for another year or so.

So....we got the car back a couple of days ago, and it seems to be working just fine. But a note to anybody reading this who might have a Volkswagen: the air intake (which brings air into the engine) sits VERY low on VWs, meaning that you have to be very careful driving in water (since it makes it much more shallow water for the engine to suck in water and stall out). We wish VW had told us about this when we bought the car! Oh well....