i'm back! it's really great to be home with my husband, the cats, my bed, the darkness, all the stars, the smell of horseshit and my hand cream.

the saab did (relatively) fine. my brothers changed the fan, after having taken the entire car apart. i'm glad i didn't have to do that myself! apparently when they build a car they start with the fan, and build the car around it... the brothers also started installing a radio, but as the saab's previous owner had cut the cables in not very clever places (according to the brothers) they didn't have time to finish it. so the radio will have to wait until next time.

of course there were some problems driving home(i rarely drive without problems...)...

when leaving the car in my brothers' hands i didn't think of telling them that the saab´s wipers don't work as they should (they don't go back to "scratch" when you turn them off, they just stop wherever they are). in order to change the fan they had to undo the hood and in order to undo the hood they had to undo the wipers. when replacing the wipers they thought they did it in the right position, as they thought they worked as wipers are supposed to work. when i turned on the wipers after about 40 km they moved down instead of up, getting stuck in the hood...

i stopped at an unattended gas station and looked in the trunk, where there were no tools. then i drove to a gas station with a small "shop" where they didn't have any tools. then i walked across the road to another "gas shop", where the tools had been stolen. then i drove to a gas station in the woods, where they didn't have any tools to lend, but where the very nice lady in the shop let me borrow a spanner that was for sale. so then i could finally adjust the wipers so that i could go on driving. i was a bit too fast though, cause they didn't go all the way to the left... but that only caused a problem in left turns :) i'll have to fix it now that i'm home.

unfortunately this wasn't the only problem. when i reached sundsvall the accelerator suddenly got stuck, and i couldn't get it up again. when i changed gear it worked again, but changing gear with the accelerator stuck in the floor is probably not too good for the engine, i guess... this happened a few times, so the last 100 km i didn't want to step the accelerator past the position where i could feel it got stuck. accordingly, whenever there was an uphill slope (which is quite often where we live) the speed dropped. not very much, but still. and a turbo where you can only use half the accelerator is not much fun, i can tell you!

anyway, we got home, and i'm sure the saab did it's best. and somehow i actually like the saab better than the toyota... i'm not used to car you can trust, i guess :)  ¶ 5:31 PM