Dallin's Florida Extravaganza

Dallin's visit to Florida

Here are some pictures we took on Dallin's recent visit. The rainy wet photos are of us in Shark Valley in the Everglades where we biked a 15 mile loop. There are some pictures of us lighting off fireworks and some pictures next to our apartment.

The Passing of an Era

After driving the Lumina for five years and 70,000 miles, Emilee and I finally sold it a couple of weeks ago. The car had become unreliable the past couple of months due to some electrical problems. Some of the wiring harnesses had become brittle with the insulation beginning to to harden and flake off. One harness in particular began to arc and short out causing the car to die. The problem with replacing that harness is that it you had to remove the intake manifold to get to it, which would have cost more than the car was worth. Though it had electrical problems, the engine and transmission were in excellent condition and would have run for a long time to come.
I put an ad on craigslist.org and sold the Lumina a couple of days later to a person from Miami.

Before we sold the Lumina we were fortunate to buy another car. A member of our ward unexpectedly needed to move to the Northeast and wasn't able to take his Ford Escape. He tried to sell it for a couple of weeks leading up to his move, but had no success. He called me up the night before he moved and offered to sell me his Escape for about 1/2 the Blue Book value. We test drove it and decided to buy it. Initially I was worried about the gas milage that it was going to get, but I have since realized that it gets better gas milage than the Lumina. We are very happy with it as it's nice to have something bigger to haul stuff around and go to the beach in.