The car that refuses to be fixed

Well, I finished the 8 hour drive from Boise, Idaho to Newport, Oregon oh, about 30 hours behind schedule. And I did the last 150 miles without my car. Yeah, the lovely folks in The Dalles did not actually FIX my car. They replaced some parts, drove it around the block a few times, said it was fixed, and sent me on my merry way. Twenty miles later my car started sputtering and died, on the interstate, AGAIN. By the time I got AAA to tow me to yet another dealership's service department, it was 4:00 on a Friday and the nice young man behind the counter told me they wouldn't even be able to look at it until Monday. MONDAY. When my panic started leaking through because I was still 150 miles from home and I was tired, out of clean clothes, and feeling too poor to spend three days in a crappy hotel in Gresham, the nice young man talked to some other nice man, and they decided to give me a loaner for the weekend so I could get the hell home. Finally. So, for the moment I'm happy enough tooling around Newport in my nice shiny loaner car that has all the power it needs, but in the back of my mind is this gnawing fear that my car is never going to be whole and functional again. I've lost faith in my car. As Zach says, maybe this is the universe telling me not to procrastinate on getting that 4-wheel drive.