January 18, 2010--New truck

Erick finally got his truck replaced after his accident last November. The insurance company took forever to settle. He only had liability on the truck, but since it was the other driver's fault it was his company's commercial insurance that had to pay for it. It was three weeks before they even contacted us. Then it was two more weeks before they sent an adjuster out to look at the truck. Then they realized that at the place they towed it to it was costing them $30 a day to store it, so they called up Erick asking for permission to move it and promising that they'd call him Monday about a settlement. They never called.

All this time he was borrowing a truck from his boss, but his boss needed it back because his other truck needed to be worked on. We finally decided that since it wasn't costing them money every day, they needed an incentive to get busy, so he called them and said he needed a rental vehicle. They set us up with one and we got a brand new Nitro--it had only been driven from Indianapolis to Terre Haute once and had less than one hundred miles on it. It was kind of neat driving a brand new vehicle. After a couple of days Enterprise sold the Nitro and asked if we could come swap it for another one. I don't remember the name of this one, but it was what used to be a Suburban. It was even nicer. I wish we could have kept that one! But the rentals were costing the insurance company $80 a day, and so they finally settled with us and we got our check Friday. On Saturday, we drove up to a small town in Northern Indiana called DeMotte and bought a burgundy Dodge Dakota. It's really pretty. We also went to the Museum of Science and Industry while we were up in that corner of the world and took the girls' best friend with us. We were up there for a couple of hours and then we went back to DeMotte to pick up the truck (we didn't want to drive separately in Chicago) and came home. It was a long and tiring day, but I'm so glad to be done with truck shopping. Erick takes forever at shopping. If it were me, I'd have just bought the first truck I could have afforded instead of driving a couple of hundred miles to get one!