The J's: The Van Repairs

In the last month we have needed to make several repairs to our van. The first of these repairs was caused by a nail in our tire. Of course, we were on the freeway when it happened. We also had the back of the van full of stuff which we had to take out in order to drop the spare tire. (Interesting task along the side of the freeway. ) Luckily, we were able to locate a nearby Les Schwab Tire and had our tire fixed in a couple of hours. We were also fortunate to find out that the tire was under warranty so there wasn't any cost involved.

Nail in the tire

Happy Jared

The next repair was the driver's side mirror.

Several months ago, I went into a store and when I came out I noticed that someone had bent the mirror all the way forward. They probably moved it to walk more easily between cars, however, doing this broke the connection of the mirror mount to the outside cover. In the picture you can see were it had already been glued back together once, and Jared was not looking forward to doing it again.

Anyway, after a week up at Girls Camp the van was quite dirty so I took it for a car wash. When I drove out of the car wash this is what I saw, NO MORE MIRROR! Ugh!

As we had tried to replace the mirror once before we knew that a new mirror was quite costly

(about $300) thus resulting in the previously mentioned glue job.

Fortunately, this time we were able to find a replacement for about $40. It is not quite as high end as the original, but we are happy with it. I never realized how much I use that mirror until it wasn't there. (Merging on the freeway was quite an adventure, a story for a different day...)

Anyway, we are very grateful for our new mirror!

Then a couple of weeks ago Jared took a day off work to spend with the family. His work has been so crazy that he hasn't had anytime off all summer. He finally had a day that wasn't too crazy and we decided to have a family fun day. We went miniature golfing, out to dinner, and then to a movie. It had been a great day until.....

On the way home from the movie, the van started to overheat. We pulled over to check things out. You know it is never a good sign to see steam billowing from the engine. After a quick check around we realized it was the radiator.

We waited for the engine to cool down, bought a gallon of coolant, put it in and drove slowly home. The next day we confirmed that we needed a new radiator. What a fun Saturday project for Jared!