Waiting... Waiting...

Waiting... Waiting... I'll never get out of Casablanca...

Well, it's not Exotic Casablanca, but I sure have been doing a lot of waiting this week!

Yesterday, I took the car in for some long-awaited repairs. As it is now our only vehicle, I was left on foot to walk a bit around the neighborhood - I toured the various seating areas (with coffee and Wi-Fi!) of one of the hospitals then strolled down Central to the Grove, a restaurant I have wanted to try (it was OK - noisy, friendly, interesting food choices, no Wi-Fi. It's all about priorities, right?). During my lunch, the amazing folks at The Shop* called - their safety check showed that one tire was unsafe to drive on (yeah, how long had that been going on?!?), so they put the spare on for me.

When I got back to the shop, we had a great discussion about what could have caused the rotors to warp (we always use the parking brake, and we don't brake hard, so it wasn't that; speed bumps and over-torquing lugnuts wouldn't do it; it's possible that our few trips when we towed a trailer might have contributed). His advice: watch for it happening again in the next year; if so, we would get brake pad credit, and we could spend some effort to track down the underlying cause. These guys are so practical, it's scary!

His other advice - go to Discount Tires (soon!). So, here we are this morning, waiting for two new tires (yep, the last one from my 2006 California-to-Iowa trip is going away). Folks here are friendly and efficient. But no Wi-Fi...

~~~
*The Shop is a fantastic car repair business! I've had the car in a few times because I was concerned about this or that - they completely understand that the car is old, and not worth spending a lot on anything but important repairs. They fix what is urgent, tell me if something is not a safety issue, and advise me on reasonable measures to take.
AND! Besides the good and important car discussions, I always enjoy conversations with Kelsey - travel, funny things that happen in life, all sorts of things :-)
Oh, and they have Wi-Fi...