photo credit: Touring Club Suisse/Schweiz/Svizzero TCS via photopin cc*
When Elder Son was in his last couple months of med school last year, we loaned him a car. He did a month's rotation in a clinic in Lowell, MA and another month's rotation at a clinic and hospital in Duluth and needed a car for both. Given that Smokey is a rather a car fanatic -- to put it mildly -- that was no problem.
Knowing that he would be doing a four-year residency soon, probably in Duluth, Smokey searched around and found a used Subaru Outback 4WD for cheap. We have had several Subarus over the years and liked them a lot, so it was an easy choice. As it turned out, this Subaru was not reliable enough for Elder Son, who has about as much mechanical sense as a toad, so we kept it and instead gave him the year-old Aveo that we had been driving. We can deal with Ms. Baru's minor mechanical glitches easily enough, plus having a 4WD vehicle is awfully nice where we live.
Fast forward a year.
I got a call from Elder Son a week ago Saturday morning. He had just totalled the Aveo by rear-ending another car that was waiting to make a left turn. One good thing was that it happened in Ann Arbor as he and his passengers were heading for the freeway on their way to NYC for spring break; had it happened anywhere else on the trip they would have been stranded. The better thing was that there were no injuries to speak of -- EMTs checked out a bloody nose and a head scrape on two people involved, but no hospital treatment was required.
Smokey has dealt with the insurance claim this past week. Try to follow along here: the insurance company valued the car, even after 2 years, as worth waaayyyy more (>2X) than we paid for it (a combination of a super-reduced on-sale price plus credit card points cut the original price dramatically), and Smokey found a replacement Aveo on eBay that was a couple years older but with significantly fewer miles for about what we had paid for the one that was totalled.
In sum, Elder Son** totalled the car, and we got a quasi-newer one plus several thousand dollars cash out of the deal. Go figger.
My husband has always had incredible luck. And if a person cannot be that lucky themselves, the next best thing is to marry someone who is.
* Not our Aveo. Ours was yellow.
** Elder Son was not injured but has been having some PTSD symptoms -- nightmares of the crash -- since it happened. He has never liked driving and once declared he was never going to own a car. I'm pretty sure he has been beating himself up over this all week. Smokey (a psych nurse, remember?) was able to reassure him somewhat. But ES does not want us to provide him with another car while he is in Ann Arbor. It may be awhile before he drives again. So we get to keep the *new* Aveo. Don't ask how many cars we have; I try to avoid counting them.
