Blue Ridge Trip '24 #12
Afton, VA - Tue, 3 Sep 2024. 4:15pmI've mentioned the Skyline Drive in my past few blogs. I should describe what it actually is, for those who don't know. The Skyline Drive is a mountaintop road that traces 105 miles through the length of Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. In the north the road starts in Front Royal, VA ( Read more... )

Alaska Travelog #15
Seward - Sun, 16 Jun 2024, 8:30pm

We got back from our day-long cruise to Kenai Fjords to an unpleasant surprise. Our car battery was dead. Well, not our car but our rental car. I'd thought the battery seemed weak the past two days when the starter motor seemed to turn sluggishly. Now it was completely dead- no lights, nothing ( Read more... )

Monday was a day without a car. Well, so were Saturday and Sunday and part of Friday. I didn't notice us temporarily being a one-car family over the weekend since we did mostly take it easy. On Monday, though, it hit me when I made (solo) plans to go out for lunch, walked down the stairs, and realized... there's no car in the garage ( Read more... )

Things are finally moving forward with my insurance company. After I started my claim last week Tuesday basically nothing happened for ten days. All they did in 10 days was neglect to return my calls (I left several voicemails with modest, pertinent requests), kick my claim from one team to another, and make flimsy excuses about nobody answering my ( Read more... )

While our car is in the shop for maybe a week or longer due to insurance foot-dragging we've got a loaner car. It's an Audi Q5 that my preferred local BMW specialist was kind enough to offer us at no added charge. (I'll note that the dealership with its much higher rates did not offer a loaner.)


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The damage to our car- a stick jammed in the radiator- should be covered by insurance. I called our insurer, Allstate, earlier this week as soon as I learned about the nature of the problem. I started a claim, got an adjuster assigned, then drove the car to my trusted specialist mechanic. The shop started diagnosis later that day and waited for an ( Read more... )

After the BMW dealership rooked us on a ridiculous price for basic service we definitely weren't going to trust them for the more expensive repairs our car needs. I took it to a trusted local independent BMW specialist on Tuesday.

The situation is that the AC hasn't been working recently. We first noticed that when those 113 days of March weather ( Read more... )

When a BMW dealership hit us with a ridiculous bill for basic service this week I was incensed. It wasn't just 20% more expensive, as dealerships tend to be, or even 50% more expensive, but literally 3x+ what a competent independent shop would charge. (I know because I called a competent independent shop I've been a customer at for years for a ( Read more... )

Yesterday Hawk took our BMW convertible to one of the area dealerships for service. It needed its 40,000 mile service interval (intervals are 10k miles), plus there were a few things we asked them to check/fix: AC not cooling, brakes squealing very slightly, and a loose sun visor. The latter 3, especially the last one, we hoped would be covered ( Read more... )

This afternoon I spent 90 minutes sitting at the tire shop to get two tires on our convertible replaced. Just four months after our last visit to the tire shop, here we are again. Two more tires have fallen victim to the pothole riddled roads in the SF Bay Area ( Read more... )