Category: Automotive

I took a few days off for spring break. Unlike last year, when we went on an epic journey to distant lands, this year we pretty much hung around the house, rested, got caught up on some chores and did a few fun things locally. The weather has been absolutely fantastic, more like June than April. We’ve been barbecuing almost every day. I haven’t seen a lot of the neighborhood kids since last fall, and its surprising how everyone’s grown.

All our flowers have come in beautifully, including the new flower bed by our neighbor’s garage that we planted last fall. We got rid of our little kiddie play structure slide and sandbox now that the kids have outgrown them. We covered in the low spot with dirt and blue stuff. The end of an era. Some other random tasks put us about half done with the spring yard work cycle. Still to go is getting the mulch under the hedges and turning over the garden. Plus getting the roof fixed. At least we got a few estimates and it looks reasonable. Oh yeah, and Lizzy’s gonna need a new bike this year.

We washed, waxed and vacuumed the cars for spring. I like to do that once a year. I also started up the Mustang, and it’s good to know it turned right over. No problems with the batteries or anything major like last year. When you step on the gas, however, there’s a temporary drop in power before it surges back. I noticed this towards the end of last summer, and I suspect it’s the carburetor. So I’ll taking it into the shop as soon as I get the chance.

On Easter Sunday Mary’s came over. It was a really nice visit and another great day. We had everyone sit at the dining room table rather than have a separate kiddie table in the kitchen. The end of another era. Everyone growing up fast.

Yesterday Jeannie and I took the girls on an outing to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and for a walk thru Central Park. It was a fantastic time. The Met has been on my list for about a year now. I haven’t been there in many years and had forgotten that it’s much more than just art. One of the big old classic New York museums, up there with the American Museum of Natural History, which I know pretty well by now, having visited a few times a year for origami the last few years.

In addition to paintings and sculpture, the Met has all kinds of artifacts: medieval armor, musical instruments, furniture, all kinds of metal, wood and glass vases, vessels, instruments and implements, plus ancient ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Inca wings. All of it fascinating stuff. (Well maybe the furniture got to be a bit much after a while…) The armor and musical instrument galleries were probably my favorite. There are two huge wings of paintings, Modern and Classical, but I feel like we didn’t really do them justice. For one thing, the whole place is laid our like a maze rather than designed for flow-thru, and the painting galleries in particular are not well organized. They could do with some signage to tell you about what county and century you’re looking at and what is the story from hall to hall. Also looking at that many paintings is a lot information, so one tends to glaze over after a while. Still the kids seemed to get a lot out of it and so did I.

They really wanted to visit Strawberry Fields in Central Park, but it was on the opposite side. On a related note, Michelle learned how to play the intro to “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the piano.

Today I crossed off another longstanding todo item: I went and got a New York City library card. I have a card for my local library but I hardly ever go cuz I’m mostly at work when they’re open. Still, I have a long list of books I’d like to read and for most books it seems such a waste to buy it and read it once and get rid of it. The main NYC library -– the famous one with the lions on the steps -– is just a few blocks from my office. So the plan is to go there on my lunch break every week or two from now on. I’d never been inside before. It’s a pretty impressive marble edifice with giant halls and stairways, like it was carved by dwarves out a massive mountain of solid stone. There was an exhibit on old maps, which is pretty cool. Only on the third floor will you find books or librarians. Apparently most of the books are in and underground vault or in the branch library across the street. They have some kind of system for checking out books by computer. I plan on going back soon to get some books, so I’ll let you know how it goes.

I mentioned that our car was having trouble last week. The car started overheating on the way home from the beach, and this seemed to affect the power and acceleration and also the braking. It was so bad we drove straight to our local garage rather than going all the way home. The car is a ’99 Jeep Grand Cherokee coming up on 100,00 miles. Jeannie has been increasingly concerned about the car’s reliability, and since this was an unexpected repair it called the whole issue of whether to repair or replace the vehicle into question.

The car was in the shop for the better part of a week, and we spent a good chunk of that time researching potential replacements. We had a camping trip coming up, which is the max load for us, with the kids and all our camping stuff filling the car to the limit, so time was tight.

We mainly use this car for family road trips, and I haul stuff around in it from time to time, so it needs to be big enough for that. Nowadays on weekdays I mainly drive it to the train station and back, but I used to work in Connecticut and that was a long commute, so the car needs to be versatile and good in rough weather, snow and terrain. It needs to be big enough, but I don’t want anything too huge. There’s a whole category of large and extra large SUV’s out there I’m not even looking at.

The one special consideration is that I’m tall, and so many car out there – even large cars – do not have enough headroom for me, so this is a major issue.

I don’t want to get another Jeep, mainly because they are not that well made, but also I don’t like the new body and style. Bigger and heavier but less interior room.

We had looked at Toyotas at the time we bought the Jeep. They were either too small or too monster-truck like, and none were especially well designed. I sat in a Sequoia, and couldn’t sit up straight because the moonroof ate up so much headroom. The one car we liked was the Highlander, but they were brand new at the time and on backorder, and we couldn’t wait, so we got a 3 year old Jeep instead. We rented a newly redesigned Highlander on or recent trip to New Mexico, and I don’t like it, particularly the interior.

We went and looked at Subaru’s earlier this week. Our other car is a Subaru, and we love the Subaru boxer engines and AWD drivetrains, and their really great long term reliability. Subaru has supersized both the Forester and the Tribeca in them last year or two so we thought we’d check them out.

We were hopeful about the Forester. It is just a bit smaller than the Jeep, but is significantly lighter and gets significantly better gas mileage, and is very well designed overall, and reasonably priced. It is big enough in the front seat but has less cargo space. The biggest problem is that you can only get it with a roof rack if you also get the sunroof, and then it doesn’t have enough headroom. Disappointing.

Tribeca is even more frustrating. It’s their flagship car and is as long and heavy as our jeep and gets comparable mileage. It has a 6-cylinder version of the boxer engine, which you’d except would be awesome. But the roof is just too low, and the curvy back end cuts down a lot on the cargo space. And again with conjoined roof rack moonroof option. With the moonroof I can’t even sit up straight in the front seat. Yeesh.

Next to look at is Hondas. The Pilot is at the top our list right now. It’s just a shade bigger than the Jeep, gets a bit better mileage, and is available in 4 wheel drive. We’ve seen a bunch of 2 and 3 year old Pilots listed for $10 less than a new one, which is generally a good point value curve. (We seem to put about $1000 a year into maintenance and repair on both of our cars, and the Subaru is even older than the Jeep, but that’s still a much better deal than losing $5K a year to depreciation.) We’re also considering the CR-V, but we’re concerned it may be too small. They look to be comparable to the Forester.

While we were building our dossier of cars to check out we heard back from the garage. The overheating was caused by a hole in the exhaust pipe up near the engine. I had known about the whole before, and the garage had said it would cost well over $1000 to replace, as the pipe was part of integral unit that includes the catalytic converter. The hole itself was caused by corrosion where a clip had been welded onto the pipe (using a different metal) to hold on a pretty-much-useless piece of heat shielding. This is a perfect example of why I’m not getting another Jeep.

When I was first told about this, I decided to fix it myself using a muffler patch kit from an auto parts store. It worked well enough thru the winter, but I guess by spring it had worn thru and the hole was larger than ever, with the weather in the 90’s it became an issue. So this time I convinced my mechanic to patch the hole by welding on a plate, which costs only a couple hundred bucks.

The repair was complicated, however, by the last time the car was in the shop. This was in Washington, D. C., at a Firestone, not at our regular garage. I had needed a new set of tires, because one of the tires was wearing unevenly on the trip. The tires were old anyway, so that was not a big deal apart from the inconvenience, but it was the result a bad alignment or something, so that needed to be done again. The thing is, the garage over-tightened and cross-threaded a bunch of the lug nuts when they put the tires on, so now my mechanic spent the better part of a day getting them off and destroyed one of the wheels in the process, which of course needed to be replaced. Luckily he charged me only a fraction of the labor cost, and wrote me a letter I can use to try and pursue some kind of remuneration from the Firestone.

But now that car is fixed and feels better than ever, and is quite again to boot. We took it camping and home again and it performed great, so hopefully we’ll get another year or two out of it without any trouble. So for now we saved ourselves the hassle and cost of buying an new car. But we’ll continue our research, cuz next time something happens to the car, we’ll probably decide to replace it, which will be much easier to do if we know what kind of car we want.

The camping trip itself was great fun, even though we had some rain. We had planned on going up Friday afternoon, but delayed because there were flood and tornado warnings up near the campground. So we went up bright and early Saturday morning, which was good because the traffic was light, by time we got there the rain was ending. Apparently Friday night was clear by nightfall, but it rained again in the morning, so everyone pitched in to help everyone else set up as fast as possible in case the rain came back. The day was clear but the rain came back shortly after dark. Lizzy and her friends go flooded out of the girls’ tent in the middle of the night when a big storm rolled thru. There was also plenty of car-related drama on the trip too. One couple drove up in an 80’s Camero that died as they rolled in. Another friend had his keys locked in his car when he sent one the boys to get mustard from his cooler. Sunday was sunny again by midday, and all our gear dried out, and we got to enjoy the lake and play guitars and all the usual cooking out and hanging out. We stayed until Sunday evening to make up for our late arrival.

Meanwhile, the summer is almost gone, and getting the Jeep fixed sort of trumped the Mustang, so doing the restoration work is deferred yet again. Ah well, one of these days…