July 2011

July 20th this is the story of a major development that we just went through. On July 10th Jon was returning from visiting his granddaughters, and was traveling the Pa. Turnpike on cruise control at 70MPH when all of a sudden the car surged and the RPM’s shot up. He pulled over and lifted the hood to find transmission fluid being shot out of the vent. After getting off of the Turnpike he stopped at an Auto Zone to see if there were any other issues. They were very helpful but couldn’t do anything, at that time he drove the car home very carefully and a 40 minute trip took over 1 Hr. The next day Monday rather than Jon playing golf he took it to a garage and they referred him to a transmission shop, he called and was told that they don’t work on Saturn’s. At that time he called another shop and was told the same story. The third shop we called could work on it but it would be the following Monday the 18th. We took it to the shop on that day and they gave us as bad report in that it would cost between $2000 to $2400 to repair it, and getting the parts could be a problem. This comes about because of the Earthquake and Tsunami and melt down of the nuclear plant in Japan. Since the American made Saturn has a Honda engine and transmission. At that time we decided not to have it repaired but to get another car, we set our sights on a Ford Escape and spent a lot of time on the internet. Today we arose and did a lot prayer into leading us in the right direction, after that we visited a few web sites that we seldom visit and saw that the Ford has all kind of problems. We then went to pick up our Saturn and talked to the mechanic and he told us to run away from the Ford as it has a Mazda transmission in it and has a lot of problems when being flat towed. We than turned our sights to a Chevrolet Equinox (ugh!), anyway we went online and shopped for a Chevy. This afternoon we became the owners of a 2011 Chevy Equinox, to pick it up on Friday. That’s our story and it is still a great day in the campground.