Views from the Cyberhenge

Well, she gave us a good 110,00 miles or so but our ’97 Dodge Avenger has finally croaked. Phaedra calls it her “little red vroom-vroom” and it certainly is/was fun to drive sometimes, but it mostly served to take her to and from work and me on my errands around the county and off to paying gigs. Yesterday the fan belts broke and the engine seized up. The doctors, excuse me, the mechanics say she needs a complete engine transplant, which will cost us around $1500—just when we were finally catching up on our other bills! Nonetheless, we will probably try to get her fixed, since we couldn’t get a reliable replacement vehicle for less than that and we just invested $300 on new tires last week.

Vroom-Vroom’s loss, following the loss of our minivan earlier this year, will mean greater difficulties in getting me to local events and gigs, but public transit will work if I leave several hours earlier going each way and have extra money up front for bus and taxi fares. For example, I’ll be going to Las Vegas Thursday for a weekend seminar with the Las Vegas CUUPS chapter on Rites of Worship. I’ll have to leave the house around 7:00 am to catch the bus to the train station, so I can take the train to the Newark Airport, to get there two hours before the scheduled liftoff. Coming back, I’ll need to take a taxi home from the train station, since the buses to our neighborhood don’t run that late.

Fortunately, Newark Airport has its own train station that connects to the New Jersey Transit train system. Flights from other airports or trips to locations in New Jersey or Connecticut that I would normally drive to will now become major hassles. Oh well. There’s bound to be some sort of lesson here, if I just look hard enough… 🙂