Van Update 🚐

I realize I have not given you guys a van update and I've been asked a lot so here's the whole, horrible story thus far. Last you guys knew, it was being towed away but here's from start to now:

Bought van, had it a single night before driving it to Seattle for a lift kit that took about 1.5-2 weeks. Flew back to Seattle, drove it home and had it less than 24 hours when it needed to go in for recall work on the pop top. Left it a week for that. Got it back, drove it about a week or so taking Capri to and from school, going to the gym, etc... prepped it to leave on our first trip with it and made it 1.5 down the road or so before it started smoking on the inside.

We pulled over, tried to figure out where it was coming from, turned everything off... couldn't figure it out. Started driving again, made it another 1.5 and it started doing it again. Pulled over to find transmission fluid allllll over the underside.

That night we had it towed back to where we bought it from, and we took our truck instead on our planned trip.

Lots of drama entailed in back and forth phone calls and the gist of it is:

It's not an official recall but the manufacturer is fully aware of the issue - there are 5,000 of these parts on backorder across the country and 15-20 Amazon delivery vans in front of ours needing the exact same repair.

The van is a 2022, only has 30,000 miles, all of this is covered under warranty, however, we are down to a single vehicle now which is not conducive to our lifestyle so we had to scramble (ie Dave) to be able to buy another workable vehicle.

As of now they've given me no ETA, just that all the parts are ordered but on backorder and they have no idea when the parts will get in or when I will see my van again. Could be spring at the earliest but they have no guesses.

So that's where we're at with the van.

Now, onto the rest of our current vehicle trouble... Dave has been driving a cargo van with a squeaky fan belt, we dropped it off to get it fixed but it still seems to be squeaking. While on our flight trip we noticed Dave's truck was making a clicking sound so I took it into the shop just a couple days ago and they gave me a loaner because it's gonna be there a while. It has a failed axel, a broken side step and an oil leak.

I plan to get out more updates to you all regarding life with a puppy, how our freeflight trip went, etc... but these bigger issues have definitely been all consuming lately making me feel pretty darn behind in content creation so I apologize for that!