The End. (We can only hope).

The story started like this...

Once upon a time

And then 7 months later this happened:

And it was a blown head gasket and 2 weeks later we finally picked her up:

And then 6 days later this happened:

And we took her to a new mechanic that I liked 150% better (thanks Stacy and Rich!) and he said... uh... basically, your engine is blown. The car was still running though so he said 'drive it around for a couple months and see what you get....' So I drove it through Christmas, which was a real blessing so that I could be with all my family at my mom's house and still get to work. But finally after Christmas I decided to take it in to be looked at. (It was having a really hard time starting at that point with all the cold and I thought 'why am I driving this around waiting for it to die? Let's get this taken care of') and so they diagnosed the engine and told me how much it would be to fix..... and basically that was more than the car was worth. So I decided it was better to go with a new car altogether. Which then of course starts the car hunt, which is soooo fun. In the mean time, some of this was happening:

I borrowed my parent's van and Kristi was good enough to save me one morning when the van was dead.

And finally yesterday we hopefully completed the end of this car story for me by finding Cora:

  

She's a beautiful car (2010 Corolla) and I'm so happy to have something reliable to travel in! It was seriously so overwhelming to me to get everything done and stressing (what, me? I never do that) about the best way to go and getting the best deal, etc. (probably most of you reading this got an earful from me asking what you thought my best option was) that although I'm totally excited to have a new car... I'm mostly just excited that it's all over (hopefully).

Thanks for the help from my buying team! Kyle came with me to test drive it the first night and then the next day Kristi drove down with me to buy it and my friend Denton came over to help make sure I wasn't doing anything stupid (he works at the dealership right next door). I have such good friends who take such good care of me.

Seriously, I had help from so many people during this whole experience. My parents let me borrow their car, Stacy let me borrow her car and drove me around multiple times, Kyle and Kristi took me everywhere all the time always and let me borrow their cars. And I had friends of friends helping me too because sometimes when I borrowed people's cars, their friends/family would then have to take them places. I am so very blessed and so grateful for all the help I received and so grateful that I can now move on with my life! It's been over 2 months now and it feels like my life has just been on hold this whole time! Time to move on and get going with this new year!