Charlie's car

Charlie's car has been making some funny noises for a couple months now. We've been thinking it's the clutch and really haven't wanted to fix it, so we've been ignoring it. Yesterday we took it in to find out what is really wrong. We figured that we should probably fix it especially if Charlie is going to be driving back and forth to Michigan for job interviews. So we get to the transmission place and Charlie goes into to talk to the guy. They come out for a test drive. The guy gets in the driver's seat and Charlie in the passenger's. They drive for maybe 10 feet, not even out of the parking lot and the guy stops the car. He says to Charlie that he isn't going to drive it any farther because he's afraid the car will blow up. He told Charlie that if it blew up while he was driving it he'd have to fix it. He told Charlie not to drive it any farther than he needed to and not to put it into 5th gear. Needless to say, that isn't really what we were hoping to hear. So we brought it home and parked it. Now we are looking for a new car for Charlie. We knew it was inevitable, we just were hoping to put it off a little while longer.

What makes the story more interesting is that we were planning a temple trip for Saturday night. I had already gone to get the babysitter and Charlie and I were just about to leave when he felt prompted to check his recommend. He did and saw that it had expired at the end of March. We were pretty bummed, but felt very relieved that we hadn't driven all the way to Chicago to find out our recommends were expired. We thought that was the blessing. Now that we know Charlie's car might blow up at any time, we know that was the bigger blessing. We are very thankful that we didn't try to drive to Chicago and have the car blow up on us on the way. Plus, the stake presidency was at our building on Sunday for the Kenosha ward conference so we were able to have our recommends renewed rather quickly after noticing they were expired. The Lord sure looks out for us even when you don't know it.

So we think we might trade in the windstar for a nice car for Charlie. We are hoping to get one that has great gas mileage. We'd actually like to get a Toyota Yaris, but unfortunately they are so new still that they aren't really in our price range. Charlie has been walking to school since the weather has been nice to help save gas. So we aren't really in a super hurry to find a car just yet. Although, it would be nice to have one just in case he has an interview scheduled that I can't make it to. So we'll see what happens