In preparation for the impending road trip/fact finding mission that Jennifer and I are embarking on, we took the car in for service at the local "Freedom Tire" outlet. THe CV joint boots are both cracked which means that the innards of said joints are crapped out. This assesment agrees with the clunking noise present in the left front wheel. Unfortunately, "Freedom Tire" really is an code, really they want to free the money from my wallet. $650 was their estimate for two half shafts, which, I have learned, are the drive units for all front wheel drive cars. This seemingly exorbitant price prompted me to think that, since I know how to fix bicycles, how much harder could cars really be, I mean really. It was going to be a big adventure, buy the parts, jack up the car, get reeeeally dirty and fix it in about 12 hours. Well, after looking at the repair manual, this dream turned to be not super fun looking after all. After calling around to less "free" establishments, we discovered a place that would do the job for $350. What a bargain. It's hard to imagine that one place would be so much more expensive than another. Is there a big difference in the quality of service or what? Number of cigarettes smoked by both places seems about even.


I mentioned fact finding mission before. Yes, this is a mission to find out the facts. The facts pertaining to the case of "Where the hell should I live next?" We're travelling out east to check out places with good stats in the following categories:
Jobs (interesting ones that pay me money)
Housing (cool old ones that just need a little loving)
Outdoor recreation opportunities (including cycling, climbing, running and skeet shooting)
Cool restaurants (Variety of cheap and delicious ethnic quisines, and steak)
Schooling opportunities (Some university where it's easy to get into the grad programs and it costs about $50)
Arts and crap (stuff like theaters and guys on the sidewalk drawing cariactures of passerbys, celebrities and bible heroes)


So, what it boils down to is this; we're going to tour all around the country, East and West, and then move back to the Twin Cities.