🚗 Stranded, High & Dry (aka RIP Toyota Matrix) 🚗

In which I end up stranded on the side of the highway 150 km from the house, and have to make some serious decisions about what to do with my poor car. As promised in last week's post, this is an update on the saga of the busted transmission!

A bit of background: late last spring, very shortly after making the drive from Montreal to Nova Scotia, the Toyota started making some goofy, goofy noises. We took it into the local garage, who diagnosed it with a transmission that was very much on its way out. It IS an 18 years old car, so not shocking, but still very unfortunate news.

The problem is that nobody within an hour radius of my house works on transmissions (or at least not Toyota transmissions? I don't remember exactly). Add onto that the fact that we couldn't find an appropriate replacement transmission anywhere nearby either --again, Nova Scotia is a pretty empty province-- and we ended up having to ship a spare part in from Quebec (the irony, I know), and the bill for fixing the car was quite high. I think we paid $900 for the "new" transmission and about $1700 in labour 😩😩. And this was before I'd released the house videos, so I had very little Patreon income and negligible YouTube earnings, and we'd dropped $10K on installing the heating system in the house. Money was tight.

*Note: we did look up how to change a transmission, just to see if it was something we could tackle, to save ourselves that labour, and it's one of the more intense repairs, because you have to remove a bunch of other systems first just to get at it. So the labour cost was justified.

Fast forward to last week. We're back in Montreal, having finished our Norway contract, and Phil would like to spend the rest of the summer working at his skydive center (if you're new here, this is what he does as a side job when we don't have circus contracts). However I convinced him to do the drive down to the house with me (you know, just in case something happens and the car breaks down and I end up stranded on the side of the road, hours from home) and then take a one way flight back to Montreal a few days later.

(CAPTION: a car packed full of supplies, including the GIANT laser cutter/engraver I mentioned in the last livestream)

And thank goodness I did, because sure enough, 1.5 hours (150 km/ 95 miles), the car made a few strange sounds that caused us to pull over to the shoulder, and POOF! Transmission had completely given up. It was impossible to get the clutch back in gear. And actually we think that it took the motor with it too, because we can't even get the wheels to roll when in neutral.

So we gathered our thoughts and started making calls. Now of course we'd talked about how we should get CAA insurance for the trip, but as it turns out, the decision to drive down when we did was very spur of the moment, and it slipped our minds in the chaos of everything else. So we didn't have roadside insurance, it was 6 pm on a Sunday evening, and we're an hour and a half away from our final destination... needless to say, it was both tricky and expensive to find someone who could come pick us up. Not to mention we had to decide on the spot if we wanted the tow truck to leave the car in the city with the transmission garage (which, remember, is about an hour away from our house), or in our driveway.

We basically had to decide then and there if we wanted to try and repair the car AGAIN, or give up on it and search for a new car. 

So we talked about it during the hour and a half that we waited for the tow truck to arrive, and we decided it'd probably be smarter to give up on this car and look for a new used one (it honestly seemed to be a lemon anyways; we'd already changed the front breaks, the front suspension, and the exhaust manifold, given it a new battery, the catalytic converter had a small hole in it, and the starter needed to be replaced).

So the tow truck arrived (icing on the cake: because there were two of us, they charged us an extra fee to use the bigger cab that fit 3 people instead of just 2 😕), we loaded the car onto it, and then reflected on our life decisions for the hour and a half ride back to the house.

Our driver was very nice; he was Philippino, and had just moved the Canada recently. Before that, he was working in South Korea for 10 years, also as a truck driver. His wife is still in South Korea, and his two sons are back in the Philippines, and his goal is to get his Canadian residency in the next few months, to be able to bring all of them to Canada and reunite the family, so everyone send some good thoughts his way, and may the bureaucracy gods smile on him and his application!

(CAPTION: Cannelle in the cab of the tow truck, wondering why I'm saying "Puppy Food" but not giving her any 🤣)

So that's where we're at. The Matrix is sitting, dead, in our driveway, and Phil is back in Montreal looking for a replacement while I'm here at the house, quasi-stranded and keeping busy! He has 3 car visits lined up today, and he's taking his mom with him, so that if they find a suitable car, he can buy it on the spot and drive away with it.

Then at some point (probably next Monday, because the weekends are really busy for skydiving, and he can earn a lot of money by staying and working Thursday - Sunday) he'll drive down again and deliver me the new car. We're sticking with the same model, because it's been amazing for hauling things (those backseats that fold down all the way are amazing in terms of how much you can pack in there), and because generally Toyotas are very reliable cars.

(CAPTION: Phil pulling the license plate off the old car to bring back with him)

Unfortunately it's been tricky to find one that has the 2.4 L engine, because the base model only comes with a 1.8L one, and we need the 2.4 in order to be able to throw the trailer on there. But, like I said, he's got 3 visits lined up today, so cross your fingers that by the time you're reading this, he'll have found at least one that looks suitable and safe 🤞🤞

You'll probably get a rundown of this situation on the channel shortly, because we're going to be spending almost all of the month of October IN REAL TIME on the channel! We're flashing forward to the present day for October, mainly because I love autumn vibes, and really want to do some projects here that are a bit more cozy and thematic.

Anyways, that's where we're at for now. I've been keeping busy sorting through antiques in the attic and getting really, really sweaty and dusty! The neighbors have been lovely - Tim, Mike, Ronnie and a new friendly face, Brenda, have all offered to lend me a car or give me a lift if I need anything, which has been very very kind of them.

(We met Brenda in the spring when she knocked on the door to introduce herself, and told us that she'd been backing up in our driveway all winter long just to leave visible tire tracks and make it look like there was someone at the house, which is super sweet of her, especially considering she hadn't met us at that point!!)

EDIT: I also want to extend a massive thank you to everyone that has supported me here on Patreon - while money is still tight, your support in the past months has allowed me to extend my budget to roughly 7K for a new car (as opposed to the original $2k budget I had when looking for the first Matrix), which will hopefully allow me to get a slightly newer and in better shape car.

Again, it's the whole boots theory of economics - I had just bought the house and had a tiny budget for a car, so I had to get a cheap one, which end up costing me as much in repairs in the next year as if I had just been able to buy a slightly better quality one at the time, but I just literally didn't have the upfront cash. I am eternally grateful of your support (especially in these questionable economic times) that have allowed me to hopefully make a better investment in the new car which, unfortunately, is a necessity for this house renovation. Thank you all so, so much 🫶🥰

Hope you all have a lovely day, and I'll have a fun hardwood floor update video coming your way very soon too!

--Shannon & Cannelle