Before I get into what happened to the truck, I want to say that having a used vehicle is a fairly new experience for me. I used to have an ancient Honda back in the day, but since 2004, I’ve had new vehicles, plus the motorhome that came with a full maintenance history. So I’m used to being able to budget for vehicle maintenance.<\/p>\n
What happened yesterday has taught me that the $50 I’ve been putting aside each month for truck maintenance isn’t going to be enough and I need to adjust the budget. I’m just glad this happened before I started to spend a lot of time enjoying New Orleans.<\/p>\n
The problem with the truck really isn’t that major. The throttle cable broke and the whole assembly needs cleaning.<\/p>\n
So:
\n$76.28 for the part
\n$163.50 for the labour
\n$59.99 for the cleaning
\nTotal: $300, plus tax (Mom thinks that’s highway robbery, but I’d rather pay the Ford shop premium and get the job done right)<\/p>\n
They will only be able to order the part on Monday and get the truck back to me Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Add in:
\n$90 for the tow
\n$40 per day for the car x 5 days = $200 (but they might adjust me down to the weekly rate which is a little cheaper)<\/p>\n
Total: at least $600.<\/p>\n
Needless to say, I am scaling down my New Orleans plans drastically. \ud83d\ude41 I am only going to be doing a self-walking tour, a guided city bus tour, and a guided swamp tour. That’s better than nothing, but don’t expect any major restaurant reviews as I am going on the peanut butter diet (figuratively speaking) for a few days to avoid adding any more debt. But I can at least be satisfied that I can weather this crisis, albeit uncomfortably!<\/p>\n
Now, it’s 11:30 and the city tour I want to take starts at 1:30, so I am going to call to see if it’s too late to make it! They do hotel pickup, but that won’t work for me out here in the wonderful swampy boonies, so I may have to get closer to New Orleans, something that could take me an hour. If I can’t get on this afternoon’s tour, I will book for the 9:30AM one tomorrow and just go explore the French Quarter this afternoon. I’m so grateful to have gotten the news about the truck early enough to salvage the day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Before I get into what happened to the truck, I want to say that having a used vehicle is a fairly new experience for me. I used to have an ancient Honda back in the day, but since 2004, I’ve had new vehicles, plus the motorhome that came with a full maintenance history. So I’m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,1027,635,5,3,16,1427],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-finance","category-louisiana","category-north-america","category-rving","category-travel","category-usa","category-westwego"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22070\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.raecrothers.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}