Happy 100k

Some of you may remember our celebration of mileage milestones from a previous post... well now it's time for another. Yesterday, en route from my sister's apartment to Gene's Bar, Sandy (our 2000 Saturn) saw her 100,000th mile.



For a while there, we weren't sure she would make it. Not long ago, I noticed an oddly powerful vibration when starting the car. This was accompanied by an odd rattle at low speeds, but seemed to vanish once the car got going. No biggie, old car, we'll see if it progresses. And indeed it did, to the point where we took it in. The culprit? A broken engine mounting bracket. Apparrently they made these things out of sub-par aluminum, and every now and then they just crack in half (see photo). Silly GM, why not skimp on the part that holds the engine in the car? After a rental, arguments with GM customer service, and a mysteriously disappearing part (we asked the service people to save the old one, and were told, 'oh, uh, we took it out yesterday, and were just waiting for the new one to come in. must've got thrown out'. mmm-hmm. i bet.) a new moutning bracket was procured and installed and the engine is safely under the hood (not on the road somewhere). Note to other potential GM buyers: we were explicitly told by GM's customer service that "All man-made things break, and your car is going to break. not all parts are in the maintainance schedule. you should just expect things to break sometimes". So the non-moving parts of the car that hold it together can be expected to fall apart shy of 100,000 miles. keep that in mind when your frame disintegrates or you wake up one morning to find your engine on the driveway. Once that warranty is up, GM's not liable for anything, so don't expect any love.

Enough ranting, this is a celebratory post. After hauling us around the country three times and back and forth to work countless others, Sandy's hit the big milestone. All told, those four cylinders of raw American family-sedan power have been very good to us (even if the customer service reps have not). To commemmorate the event, we decided to apply stickers of the flags of all the states she's been driven in... and we should be adding a few more on our upcoming jaunt to New England. Now how to drive a car to Hawaii? Hmmm...