At last the grand finale. I am now finally mobile again, after having sat without my beloved Jetta Jameson for quite some time now (haven’t been to the office or even karate practice in the meantime), though I just wish my wallet wasn’t sobbing quite so loudly at her return.

R4,063 it cost me this time around to get her back up and running.

But in all fairness, it didn’t start out costing that much, as it usually does if you think about it. As mentioned in the last chapter of this saga, I had left Jetta Jameson in the capable hands of mechanic supremo Ian Basson over at Nistec in Tokai where I let him happily tinker away while I got stuck into powering up my home office and working from home again.

Considering the fact that my car was overdue a service by at least a month or two, I phoned up Ian and asked that while the car is already sitting in the shop, if they wouldn’t just service it for me while they’re at it, a brilliant idea, but an idea that nevertheless had me chewing down on my bottom lip in the hopes that I wouldn’t be getting that dreadful phone call that usually accompanies Jetta Jameson services where the mechanic phones you up to tell you the unpleasant surprise that they had discovered.

But nothing ever came and I started to feel a tinge of joy in my heart at the prospect of only paying for a service and the R900 for the replaced cable – which is of course exactly when the phone call did come through. As Ian explained, they had replaced the pin and cable, completed the service and as they rolled her out of the workshop, all of a sudden the clutch gave in completely – meaning that they had to ship her back into the garage and now drop the box to find the problem – and lo and behold, the time for a complete clutch kit replacement was finally upon me.

Not altogether unexpected if you consider that I’ve yet to ever replace the clutch on the car despite the number of years I’ve owned the car and the number of kilometers on the clock (239 000 in case you are wondering), but still sucky because that meant the horrible boost in cost that I was so dreading – and boost it did.

To cut the story short, the job took far longer than expected, it cost a lot of money (there there oh wallet of mine – could be worse of course, I’ve spent R11 000 on the car once if I remember correctly) and was a pain in the ass logistically for me in particular.

But at least I now have her back (thanks to Chantelle and our ever friendly GPS for getting me there) and she’s riding smoothly again – though with her new clutch and the setting completely different from what I’m used to, I am looking a bit like a Noob Poephol every time it comes to pulling away from a stop street at the moment! :)

Sorry about that.