I'm a changed woman.

Or at least I will be by this evening...I'll be $2975.18 poorer. Thanks to the van, of course. Obviously, the starter had gone bad. That much we pretty much knew. There's $400 of it. Add to it two broken axles ($500), and replacing every damn part that routine maintenance should have taken care of for the last 90,000 miles, and that brings us to our total. I guess the previous owners really, REALLY didn't take care of the van. That explains why we got it so cheap! (Let's put it this way...the repairs are going to cost more than the van did to begin with!) Fortunately, other than the starter and axles, there's nothing MAJOR wrong with the van. The rest of it was minor stuff that just needed done/replaced. Lots and lots and lots of minor stuff. Oh, and I got the a/c recharged. Yayyyyy!!!

I've only put about 500 miles on the van since I got it in August. I only drive it in town, and not too often at that. I guess now that everything has been fixed, we won't have to worry about taking it out on the highway. Maybe we can even roadtrip in IT instead of cramming all of the kids in the back of the Civic. Yay! I'm hoping that we'll get MUCH better gas mileage now. Before, we got about 19 mpg. Not horrid, considering it's 13 years old and huge. But maybe with everything fixed, it'll do better. Wish me luck.