Next week I’ll be attending the third annual BoatFest, which has nothing to do with boats at all. It’s a retrocomputing convention that takes place each year in Hurricane, West Virginia. Last year, my buddy Jeff and I made the 1,000 mile drive (each way) in a rented RV. While I owned the van at that time, it was nowhere near ready. My plan all along has been to drive the van to West Virginia for this year’s gathering. If you’ve been following my blog posts and videos you know that pretty much everything I built to put in the van recently fell apart. I’ve spent the past few weeks busting my hump redoing everything. There’s a new bed, a new desk, a new storage area, new walls, new insulation… new everything.

Well, almost new everything. Same old van.

My van has a problem with pulling to the left, and part of the problem is, it doesn’t do it all the time. When it doesn’t do it things are fine, but when it does do it, it’s a fairly significant pull — like, if I were to let go of the steering wheel, the van would veer off the road in less than a second. I know just enough about cars to be dangerous and so I have a long list of things I think are not the problem. If it were the suspension, or alignment, or the tires, or the steering column, or the power steering, I would expect the problem to happen all the time. The fact that it’s only happening every now and then makes me think it has something to do with the brakes.

Last year, around this same time, I ended up taking my van to a local Ford dealership in hopes of getting the problem fixed. I must have “sucker” written across my forehead because they found a long list of things to repair, but couldn’t reproduce this particular one. They replaced brake pads, replaced an oxygen sensor, and a whole bunch of other things. The bill was somewhere in around two grand. Everybody I told that story to told me I got ripped off.

My wife will be joining me on my trip to West Virginia, and earlier this week while riding in the van she noticed how hard it was pulling to the left. She convinced me to take the van into Hibdon’s to have it looked it. I did, and the news is terrible. Well, not terrible. Just expensive. According to them, the entire brake system needs replacing. The conversation started with the repairman saying, “let me rip the band-aid off” before telling me the cost of repairs. He said the front brakes are completely locking up. I heard terms like new calipers, and brake lines, and bearings. Some of the things went by so quickly that I missed some of them. Near the end of the list i heard “broken tie rod.” At the end of all those items he told me the price, and I thought I was going to throw up.

It’s a lot.

With four days left before our road trip is scheduled to begin, the only option I see is to pay it. I don’t have any friends who can perform this repair, so that’s out of the question. I called a couple of local repair shops, all of which have waiting lists of several weeks to be seen (and no guarantee of a cheaper price). It is not realistic for me to learn how to do this repair in four days. The only immediate options I see are repairing the van prior to the trip, or taking a different vehicle to West Virginia (which only delays the necessary repairs). Based on what I’ve been able to Google, the cost of the pairs is at least half of the price I was quoted. I’m stuck. If I want to keep driving the van, and especially if I want to drive it across country next week, I have to have these repairs done.

I want to talk about my Chevy Avalanche for just a moment. I bought a new Chevy Avalanche in 2006, made a lot of extra payments on it, and was able to pay it off in three years. I drove that truck “payment free” for the next 13 years — from 2010 to 2022. (In early 2023, I passed the truck on to my son.) I only did basic maintenance on the truck, things like changing the oil and maintaining the tires, and it’s still going strong at nearly 200,000 miles. I did have to occasionally have minor repairs, but I always justified the cost by reminding myself I wasn’t making a regular car payment.

Back to the van. I got a relatively good deal when I bought the van, but in two years I’ve had two relatively expensive repair bills. I’m having trouble justifying the cost, and I am afraid I’ve officially invested more into the van than it’s worth.

I’ve had repair bills like this before and I know that with time, the amount will become easier to swallow. I can only hope that I don’t encounter any more large repair bills before the sting from this one wears off.