Cars! *sigh*

When I was a little girl my dad was a mechanic. Anything made before 1980, he could take it apart and put it back together with his eyes closed. You would think that meant that we had cars that always ran. big WRONG. We always had some POS car that broke down constantly. I guess they figured that since my dad was a mechanic that they would buy cheap ass cars and he would fix them constantly. Out of the 30 years they lived in that house, I bet you for 20 of them there was an unusable car parked in the garage. When I was a senior in High school (class of 1998  ) I drove an '82 Honda civic hatchback. Half way through my senior year, it over heated and the head cracked. So they put a new engine in it. A month later it happened again. This time while I was on the busiest bridge in Portland with two logging trucks to the side and behind me. Anyway, 4 engines later I said screw it and bought my own car. Turns out the radiator hadn't been flushed in eons and that was causing the problem. I swear that every major family vacation I have been on, our car has some how broken down. So many memories of sitting on the side of the road waiting for someone to help us.

Anyway, I now have a STRONG aversion to older cars, and I also get sick to my stomach every time that the car doesn't sound perfect. Since my dad doesn't know what he is doing with the new cars, Ive had to take my car to mechanics. Sorry to any mechanics out there, but I'm not sure that honest ones exist in my town. (I would love to be proven wrong!) Once I had the catalytic converter installed in my Canadian made Pontiac. I was driving down the freeway with my old boyfriend and all of a sudden there was a horrible noise. We pulled off at the next exit and he checked it out. They hadn't braced it and the entire exhaust had disconnected in the middle. My boyfriend was pretty handy and there was a bike shop in the same parking lot. He got some break line (for bikes) and used that to support the exhaust until we could take it back to the shop. We get there and I tell them what had happened (leaving out the break line) and they went and took a look. They came back and told me everything was fine. Um HELLO! there is bicycle break line holding my exhaust together!

So that brings me to now. We bought a 2002 Toyota sienna 2 years ago. We decided to go for one nice car instead of two older cars so that hopefully we wouldn't have many problems. So far it has been a great car, but it needs some little things fixed. It needs some fluid flushing, a good tune up, and something is wrong with the suspension? that makes it bounce when you break. Plus the tires need balancing and all that jazz. I want to get it done before its an issue, but I'm so worried that some SOB mechanic is going to lie to us and tell us that we have $2k worth of work that needs to be done on it. Plus one car inst cutting it for our family anymore. With three kids that need to be places, and shakes working on campus now, its getting really hard to be everywhere we need to be. So we are looking at buying a second car. But we would have to get an older car to afford it.
So how does one find an honest mechanic, and Is buying a 20 year old VW begging for trouble?
I hate cars. Why cant we all ride horses. Or fly! Flying would be nice....