Merry Christmas/Stuck in MI

I hope all of my four loyal readers had wonderful Christmases. Anne and I had (and are still having) a wonderful time in Michigan visiting her parents. In fact, we were having such a great time that our car decided we should extend our stay by breaking down and leaving us stuck here until we can get it fixed (hopefully today). Either that or the Big Three have turned to the desperate measure of using voodoo on foreign cars that venture too close to Detroit.

I just got a call from the mechanic. We need new spark plugs and wires and we may have melted the catalytic converter but he won't know until he gets it running again. If the CC is busted it is supposedly under warranty for 80,000 miles which we are about 1000 miles away from. I hope it's not broken but at least VW should pay for it if it is.

UPDATE: The catalytic converter is fine but the distributor coil is also broken so that needs to be replaced. It should be fixed by 1 or 2 and then we'll hit the road.

UPDATE: UPDATE: The catalytic converter is partially blown out and needs to be replaced but the car can run and we got home just fine. I will try to get a VW dealer to replace it for free since there is a federal mandate of warranty on catalytic converters for 80k miles and our car is only at 79500!