Car trouble sucks. Last time Our transmission blew, we got out of it lucky - sort of. It was just that the threading on the drive shaft was stripped (Mecrury Tracers are truly bizarre in the way they connect the engine to the transmission), and all we needed to do was replace that one part, rather than the whole thing. Granted, it still came to something clos to seven hundred dollars, but it could have been worse.

I rememebr when our car went out on the way back from my best friend's wedding last year. We were driving through Richmondville, NY (you've never heard of it, and there's a reason) when, suddenly, our car started acting *very* strange and ALL THE IDIOT LIGHTS CAME ON ALL AT ONCE. Now, that's *never* a good sign. This was at seven o'clock Sunday night in the middle of stinking nowhere. So we eventually (after a few hours of trying to find a mechanic) called the state police, and they found somebody who could at least tow us to a hotel and put our car somewhere that wasn't "side of the road," as it no longer so much as started (the engine wouldn't even turn over). After paying ridiculous amounts of money (they were kind enough to charge us $100/night for the hotel room instead of the listed price of, like, $160/night), we finally got out of there on *Wednesday* when they were able to look at our car. Turns out our timing belt went out.

We were lucky. We were, in fact, *seriously* lucky - if your timing belt breaks, it's liable to cause your entire engine to demolish itself. That all depends on the positions of the valves when the belt snaps - if they're open, or partially-open, the pistons will beat the cylinders into mush. But that didn't happen to us, fortunately.

So I guess the point of this story is, err, make sure you get your timing belt changed regularly. And that I concur with Dave - it absolutely blows to have your car break down when you're in some little tiny town in the middle of who-knows-where. It's even worse when you don't have a cell phone.