It took 12 days for the mechanics to 1) discover what was wrong and 2) fix what was wrong with our Forester. That's 2 days, a weekend, a week, another weekend and 2 more days from when they towed in the Forester on Thursday afternoon, April 18th, until Jeff drove it home yesterday, Monday, April 29th. During that time we were taken to the grocery store once...after 5 days without a car...so we could restock the cupboard. Then we just waited. And slowly started to run out of things.
Bread was the first thing we ran out of but I was able to make bread twice so we were able to hold on for a few more days. We finally ran out completely on the 2nd Sunday. (When I actually ran out of white flour and yeast.) We ran out of butter about the same time but when there's no bread, butter doesn't seem so important.
Prescriptions were next to empty out and Jeff started hitting the bottom of his Rx bottles by the end of the week. I managed to last until the 2nd Sunday and then ran out of only 1 of my Rx's.
We drink a lot of coffee and the canister of coffee beans got low quickly. I went into Jeff's stash (he's a prep-er and has a stockpile for when 'shit hits the fan') and dug out a bundle of coffee that he had sealed in small packages. That gave us enough coffee for the rest of the time. We finally ran out of coffee this morning...actually last night but I tried to make a pot of coffee this morning that was just so weak the proverbially dish water was stronger! We should have bought coffee yesterday when we finally got to the grocery store but neither of us remembered,
We ran out of other things along the way, too. Things like certain can veggies (there's still more than enough cans of beets in the cupboard) and coffee creamer. Dry cereal and soda didn't last the entire 12 days either (but I did get $1.85 in returned bottles when I returned the empties yesterday!). Good thing Easter Sunday was at the beginning of this experience because it gave us some special desserts...for a few days. And we never ran out of meat and potatoes. Our freezer is full and Jeff had just bought a big bag of potatoes for Easter.
And now to the cause for all this, our Forester. On Thurs., April 18th, it stopped running on Rte 5S between Herkimer and Mohawk without any warning. The lights on the dash came on and with a weird sound, the engine stopped. (Actually, it was the transmission that stopped). Jeff was told a couple of bolts on the rear fly-wheel sheered off causing everything to stop. We had had the transmission replaced less than a year ago so everything was still under warranty (thank God) and when the mechanic finally found that 2 of those bolts had broken he charged us only $156.24. The only way those bolts could have broken like that, Jeff and the mechanics agree, is because someone did not tighten them correctly. Now I don't understand exactly what that means. You can tighten a bolt only til it's tight, right? Well, I guess not. You have to tighten a bolt so many pounds so it won't loosen. Too much and it will break; not enough and it will wiggle around until it snaps. The mechanic wasn't happy and neither was Jeff. I won't say how I felt except that I had gone to Cooperstown alone the day before. Now that's 35 miles of up and down hills to Cooperstown and 35 miles of up and down those same hills back home. Just thinking that the bolts could have snapped during those 70 miles.... Any way, they didn't snap then and they're replaced now. I don't care if the Church has sort of pushed St Christopher off to the side of the road, I called on him and every other saint I could think of those 12 days and they all came thru. I just hope that's the end of my automotive adventures for this year.
p.s. Oh, Jeff had to take a taxi from our house to the mechanics in Little Falls so he says I should add the cost of the cab, $11, to the bill bringing the total up to $167.24.
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