Intermission

(Michael) The rest of our trip will be documented shortly, but I just wanted to give an update about our fun Saturday project last week.


I should have seen it coming, but I didn't even think when I said the words "our cars haven't had any problems in a while."  And now we are that much more believers in the concept of jinx.


Our Camry wouldn't start.....


(Amanda) Let it be known that this happened only a day after he mentioned our cars not having any problems. 1 day! Beware the jinx.....ok back to Michael


It sent chills up our spine after we thought about our last car repair, however there were many things to be grateful for.


1) Our apartment complex was in the middle of resurfacing the asphalt, but we just happened to park in one of the few sections that they had already been finished.


2) We had our trusty Civic so we didn't have to break out the VW Bug this time.


3) And most importantly, we had my dad there on Saturday who was able to save the day (again).


Everything was working like clockwork that day (we figured it was the starter and thanks to some good instructions we found on the internet we were able to pop it right out) but I guess we let our hubris get the best of us.


We discovered that Autozone will test your starter for free and so after spending less than an hour getting the starter out we took it there to get tested, only to be met with disappointment. We were dumbfounded when the Autozone lady said our starter was working just fine.  Really fine, in fact.  So it was back to the drawing board and dad came up with some brilliant tests to see what else could be causing the problem.


After several of these tests, everything kept pointing to a bad starter, and that's when Amanda had the great idea to take our starter and see if it would work in my dad's car.  Sure enough, it didn't....Autozone had betrayed us.  And this after we had praised them for testing it for free.


We went back and had them test it again, just to see what they would say.  Of course this time it failed the test. 


Hard to be too upset though, since we were able to get everything up and running.  Now I just need be a lot more careful to not say anything about the status of our cars.


(Amanda) I would just like to point out that we would have been finished our car repair in an hour or so if the Autozone test had actually failed our starter the first time. Instead we spent 6+ hours trying to figure out what else could be causing the problem. Originally we had planned on getting our starter somewhere cheaper, but by the time we realized it really was our starter everywhere else except Autozone was closed. Well played Autozone, well played.