Of course, we still managed to fit some fun in between...
Having friends over to help with the garden (which was awesome)!
Pride
I had already had the insurance adjuster come out to see my car; he estimated the damage to at $7,000 but said that estimate would rise as the repair shop found more damage. I had bought my car for around 13k so I was hopeful that it wouldn't be totaled. Kade's estimate was similar, and her car was worth a lot more than mine. Probably we would be fine. Neither of us wanted to lose our cars -- mine was a rare color and incredibly low-mileage for its age, and she was practically in love with hers, and didn't have the resources to get another new one.
I had a rental car for a couple weeks while waiting for my car's smashed window to be fixed. Finally SafeLite arrived with a windshield, which turned out to be the wrong one for my car. More waiting. When the windshield did get replaced I returned the rental car.
It was very difficult to find a shop that could repair the body damage. There had been a huge hail storm in Denver in May 2017 and, I was finding, shops for 50 miles out were still booked out till December 2018 or later. My adjuster came up with a shop in Aurora that had openings and terrible reviews. I said I'd keep looking. I found a five-star paintless dent repair place in Boulder that said I couldn't book through them directly, since I needed panel replacement too, but a certain auto body shop who contracted with them should be able to get me in soon and to "tell them you talked with Emily." I was able to make an appointment for about a week out.
The next day a major hailstorm hit the area, wounded one of our chickens and knocked the growing fruit off our fruit trees. The body shop would soon have a voice message saying they were not making any new appointments until January 2019.
There was another, similar storm in the area a week later. The next day, I drove to Boulder with K. to drop my car at the shop and pick up another rental. They told me they couldn't rent any cars because the hailstorm the previous night had damaged them all. Neither could any of the other shops in Denver or Boulder.
K. very sweetly made a call to her insurance to put me on the policy, a requirement for me to be able to drive her rental car. The woman was very helpful and after a long time the process was nearly complete when the call got disconnected. K. called back and received a different woman who said it couldn't be done (I no longer remember what exactly was the issue). After a great deal of back-and-forth a solution was discovered and I was added to the policy, and dropped K. off at work and headed to my PT appointment.
Hot air balloon festival
We shared a car for a couple weeks. This was difficult because my work, K's school and home form a triangle with its points up to 45min apart from each other, and K. not only goes to school but works two part-time jobs, and with my various issues I can have four health care appointments in a week. In short, things were stressful.
Hiking & more hail
Then, the worst news came. K. learned that after further damage assessment by the body shop, her car had been declared a total loss by her insurance company. This was quite a blow. The car was the only one she'd ever had that she truly loved, and even with the insurance payout she wouldn't be able to put forth a big enough down payment to get another. She considered keeping the car and using the payout to repair only the worst of the hail damage, but when she went to talk to the body shop about the costs involved, she found the car torn apart. They said it would take something like $6k just to put the car back together, never mind repairing the dents and chipped paint.
It was a bad day. A bad week. Really, a bad summer.
When K's car was declared totaled, they told her they would only pay for her rental one more week. What's more, the amount they were going to pay her was lower than what similar cars were selling for online. K. argued their decision and provided examples but they didn't budge. Since time on her rental was running out, she decided to move on and find a new car. She chose a used Chevy Volt.
However, because insurance is horrible, it took us a week to get the paperwork they "overnighted" so that K. could sign it, and another week for her to get the check from them. The dealership that had the Volt, an eerily bright and immaculate Volvo outpost with gleaming Scandinavian styling, was almost comically obnoxious and incompetent. They called K. repeatedly to say they were about to sell the car to someone else, even when she'd told them numerous times that she had no control over when the check arrived; they failed to charge the car up for us; they printed out a copy of her deal to sign that contained random numbers in some of the fields. Thankfully, the car appears perfect and there have been no problems with it other than blowing up some of the outlets in our house.
I got another rental car. Then it was my birthday. I had planned for several friends to join us on a camping trip. It went extremely well and was the first time since before the big hailstorm that I'd felt happy, except for both of us getting sick and K. throwing up in the tent in the middle of the night.
We did a very nice hike on a trail that is unnamed on my map, but K. started to feel poorly by the end, and very poorly by the time we went to bed. During the night she was very ill, and I had to run back to the tent and get a ziploc for her to throw up in (and we had set up our tent very far from the car). In the end it seemed better for her to sleep sitting up (near a large store of bags) so we settled her in the car. In the morning she was well enough to hang out in the sun, but my cold was worse.
This belonged to the family that camped next to us. It's not a camping trip without the family suit of armor.
Frustratingly, we both continued to be sick for several weeks after. My cold would go away for a couple days then come back (or I'd catch a different one?) K. was better for a bit, then quite bad for a couple weeks. This really was not the best summer of our lives.
We did return to the birthday-camp area a couple times for more camping and hiking, which was mostly pleasant despite illness.
4th of July fireworks!
An uncommon red columbine
Some of the beauty and glory of former, happier summers was recaptured on a hike I took at Brainard Lake Rec Area:
On the home front we were still struggling. A cursory web search for electric vehicle info will tell you that you just plug your car into a regular outlet at home to charge it up. This is what K. did, with the effect of burning out two of our outlets, one of which was in my room.
A more thorough web search will reveal that while theoretically, everyday home outlets are safe, often they are installed in a slapdash manner without the right kind of wires and such, and either way it's safer to have industrial-strength outlets installed. (Our landlady's preferred handyman finally came and fixed this yesterday. Kade had been charging her car at 2/3 the usual power to keep from blowing any more outlets.)
With each of us having a car again, things were edging back towards normal. The cost estimates for fixing my car kept climbing as the body shop found more and more damage, but perhaps because it was only a little higher each time, the insurance company kept approving it. The shop's original time frame was a month for the repairs. As the summer stretched on I began pestering them more, but getting a call back was like pulling teeth. I told them that we were going on a two-week road trip in late August and needed the car before then.
I got to take a little solo backpacking trip on the Buchanan Pass trail.
More hail. Also, I lost my trekking poles. When I finished the hike I leaned them against the back of the car, then put my backpack in the trunk and drove away. As soon as I realized that I hadn't put the poles in the trunk too I drove back but they were already gone. They weren't anywhere in the parking lot or at the head of the trail. Lost & found postings were unsuccessful. I have such faith in the goodness of hikers that it's hard for me to believe they were just taken. It's only my second time having something of mine taken while backpacking (see Chop wood, carry water for the first incident). And it maybe doesn't even count, not having been on the trail at the time.
At home, we made a canopy for the chicken enclosure:
Soon, K. was taking her finals. The summer was almost over. She had time to join me on another short hike, though decided to stop at one point and let me go on. When I returned I found her studying in a tree.
The body shop was always just "one more week" away from finishing my car. This was problematic as my insurance only covered 30 days of car rental (and only up to a certain amount per day -- I was still paying $2.50 a day, which isn't much but was still $2.50 a day more than I wanted to be paying). Since my adjuster had been virtually unreachable since the start of the affair, often failing to respond at all and otherwise not for days, I asked the agent assigned to me for an extension. Absolutely not, he said. So, more out of thoroughness than hope, I contacted the adjuster, and an extension was immediately approved (!). For a while, anyway. When that was cut off I reached out to the shop, who agreed to cover me until the car was fixed. I had by now made literally dozens of phone calls regarding the whole car affair.
The car had now been in the shop for two months. Finally it was "one more day", which was good, as we were leaving for our big trip in two days. Except, they didn't finish it. K. offered to call and threaten -- er, speak convincingly -- to them. We went together to the shop the night before the trip and took back the car, few remaining dents notwithstanding, and returned the rental (with my house key still on the keychain, as I later discovered... oops).
It was time for our vacation, and boy did we deserve a break. Now we had the car, the vehicle I had chosen partly for this road trip, been so excited to buy, seen trashed in a massive hailstorm a week later, and only gotten to drive for two weeks total out of the ten I'd owned it. In just 24 hours we would take it back to the scene of the crime -- Vedauwoo, Wyoming -- for the first night of camping on our trip. Were we tempting fate??
Read more soon...
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