Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

I'm on vacation. Not from the blog or anything specific...just vacation. After The last three weeks of long night of baseball games, and crazy-insane stuff going at work, and Julianna sick and teething, and Owen sick off and on, and all this after pushing myself really hard with baseball since the beginning of March....

I REALLY needed a vacation.

So I took one. I'm off of work and baseball (in fact, baseball season is pretty much over) and most things until next Monday. I'll still do a little blogging, because I don't consider this work...usually. But I'm definitely not going to be working. I'll do some stuff around the house, and I'll do stuff with the kids, and just generally take it easy.

Also, I might end up getting a new car to replace the Bronco. This last one isn't because I'm tired of it, which I'm not. It's mostly because the Bronco makes me nervous, and I really don't have the time, money, or patience to try to keep it going. The drivetrain is all fine; the engine still acts up from time to time but it runs and doesn't give me too much grief. But there ARE a lot of things that need to be replaced. For example, just about two weeks ago, just in time for the rain, the tailgate window decided to start acting up. As in, not going up and down reliably with the motor. This means I would need a replacement motor and drive gear. This isn't terribly expensive...less than $100 total with shipping and all...but I'd also need time to do the replacement myself, and it's somewhat time-consuming. Plus, I'd rather not spend the $100 if I can avoid it. However, obviously, one of the most important parts of the Bronco, the cargo area, is largely unavailable to me through the primary access because of this fault. So if I'm keeping the Bronco, this will need to be replaced. The Bronco also has needed a great deal of the weatherstripping replaced for quite some time as well. This would run about $300 for a full kit to replace it all. It also needs a new windshield, since that's cracked in two places and one of those cracks is non-trivial. Throw in another $185 for that. It needs shocks badly, and will need tires soon. The body is pretty rust-free for a truck of its vintage, but it is getting some bad rust at the bottom of the tailgate, so that needs to be replaced some time...and of course, body replacement also means painting. That's probably around $800 for that entire project. AND the tailgate window needs to be replaced because the tailgate window weatherstrips have become dry-hardened over time and have actually etched slightly into the glass. I have gotten a quote for this of nearly $300. Finally, there's 178,000 miles on this engine and transmission, so I have to keep that in the back of my mind.

Does all this bother me? Obviously it does, but not because there's so much that needs to be done. The problem for me is that we have three vehicles: the 2004 Ford Freestar minivan that is Heidi's primary driver, the Bronco, and the Mustang. I love the Bronco and would love to keep it. However, to keep it, I would need to be bringing in enough money to be able to fix all of these niggling issues. None of them is a show-stopper, but driving it around with these problems is troubling to me. Plus, we've been having a lot of issues with the minivan lately, and I don't want to be having to put tons of money into all three of our vehicles. Within the past two months alone, we have spent over $1600 on repairs between just the Bronco (new brakes) and the Freestar (PCV tube replacement, busted A/C partial repair). Considering that, if those issues had not come up, that amount of money would've gotten the Mustang back on the road with the rebuilt engine and new tires, having to constantly spend all this extra money on two vehicles that I like A LOT less than my Mustang is really frustrating to me, and has been a real bone of contention over the past few months. I have not liked working my butt off so we could have some extra money to do things we WANT to do, then having to spend all that extra on things we DON'T want to do, like maintain two busted vehicles. Yes, yes, I know..."Chris, you should be thankful you had that extra money to handle these issues as they came up." Yes, I am...but if I can simplify the car situation and get rid of something that does very well at sucking away all that extra money, I'll be much happier.

Besides, if I'm going to be spending money on a car, why not just get a good used car for under $10K, and effectively amortize out what I'd be spending on the Bronco, anyway? AND have the benefit of driving a vehicle that I don't have to worry nearly as much about?

So I'm looking at a nice small hatchback, something like a Ford Focus, a Hyundai Accent, a Honda Civic, a VW Golf, a Mazda3...that sort of thing. We'll see how it goes. Given our financial past, I might not be able to make it work right now, anyway...in which case this whole discussion is moot and I just have to swallow it all and deal with it. (It certainly wouldn't be the first time in the past few years that I've had to just deal with what life has given me, with no short-term hope of improvement. Heidi and I are kind of getting used to that, to be honest.)

So wish me luck! Of course, when the situation works itself out, there will be a nice blog post about it.