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Adventures with the car

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

Up to this point in the trip, we’ve been lucky and haven’t had any problems with the car. On our stop-over in Fort Worth, we got an oil change at Midas. They told us that everything checked out perfectly, not a surprise but still comforting. The same afternoon, we filled the gas tank. Just after pulling out of the gas station, our gas gauge dropped to empty, the gas light and the check engine light came on. At first we thought we had put the wrong gas in the car or that the pump hadn’t worked (despite the $70 we paid) and that we had run out of gas. The car continued to run fine, so we determined that it was problem with the gauge. After about 70 miles, the gauge started working again and the next day the check engine light went off. The following day, Fabien noticed that we were leaking oil. Sure enough there was a small, growing puddle of oil under the car. He tried to remove the cover, but we decided that we were better off taking it to shop (didn’t want to spill oil in a state park.) We went to another Midas nearby just before closing. The guy was extremely nice and stayed late to check it out. Apparently the oil filter was loose- they hadn’t tightened it well enough the day before. They tightened it, cleaned it up and topped off our oil.

In Austin, we woke up one morning to find a 6-inch crack in our windshield that was growing. I called Progressive, our insurance company and found out (to my delightful surprise) that it was covered under insurance with no deductible since in the state of Florida it’s illegal to drive with a cracked windshield. They even arranged for a mobile unit to come to our camp site to repair the windshield. It was actually pretty cool to see how they install it and the repairman was very enthusiastic about showing us how it’s done. At the same time, Fabien did some research about our gas gauge problem and we found out that it was a common problem on Nissan Xterras. In fact there had been a factory recall on some models. I called our dealership who told me that we had an extended warranty to cover it. We went to the Nissan dealership in San Antonio and they repaired it in about 2 hours.

They say that bad things happen in threes so we hope that’s the end of our car troubles for a while. In fact, none of the problems cost us a dime, just a little time, and we met some pretty nice people in the process. Adventures on the road…