Oh Ava

Ava is the name of Jake's Avalanche. She has put our pocketbook through the wringer recently. I believe there's still one repair, an expensive one, to make on it, but we're waiting to get a little more money saved before we take her back in. The most recent problem was when the truck completely broke down! It had been making funny sounds and the emergency brake wasn't working properly on it.

This day (May 12, 2010), Jake and I went to Oakley with the trailor attached (which is broken too, but that's a different story). We had driven seperate and I was a little ahead of Jake. I get a phone call from him asking where I was. I told him. He tells me that I may have to turn around. As soon as he tells me what's going on with the truck I immediately turn the car around and met him at Lowe's. We looked around the truck and didn't see anything, but it smelled really bad. I looked under the truck (Jake's knee was hurt so he wasn't able to look underneath) and saw lots of grease that had sprayed everywhere. Geal oil! NOT good. So ever so slowly we made our way with emergency lights on to a road that's off the main road. Jake drove about 10 miles per hour for the couple miles we were from home.

When we got home we knew we had to get the truck into the mechanics. Jake went to back the trailor up onto the driveway and.... *POP* LOUD NOISE! He had to drive around the block and park in front of the house where we had to unload the trailor and unhitch it. I went in the house and started calling transmission mechanics since it seemed like that's what it was. The next morning we called a tow truck and they hauled away Miss Ava. Shyla was really sad the guy was going to take away her daddy's truck. Hard to explain to a 3 1/2 year old that it's going to be fixed and brought back, but we told her the best we could that it wasn't going to be gone long. It ended up being almost a week before we got her back.
The tow truck guy tried to pull the truck in neutral up onto the bed, but being that the truck literally and completely broke down, it didn't even want to move. That's the loud popping you hear. The gears didn't want to work. SO, the guy had to put the emergency brake on and drag the truck up. See video 2.

After being towed to a second location we were told that the back end of the truck needed to be replaced. Of course with our luck they weren't able to rebuild it, but we needed a brand new one. $2,100 later... we have Ava back in action!