Poor Pearl

Ok...so, I think I'll finally share this not so awesome thing that happened to me...us...on June 3rd. I'm really, really not excited about this, but, now that it is all taken care of and fixed, I feel a little better about it. ***Please note that we'd appreciate our followers reading this fully before asking questions. I, Krista, don't enjoy the fact that this happened.***

Alrighty, so I'm coming home, almost to a parked position, when our brand new car turns into a quite damaged car. Henry and I like to park behind the pool in our complex as there is not as much traffic there and less cars parking in that area. There's also a spot that we frequently park Pearl in to prevent door dings on at least ONE side of the car since it's an end spot.

As I made the corner at the back of the property, I touched the brakes a tad (after already slowing down through the lot) because I thought I might not park in that normal spot and park a little closer to the apartment. I decided, "No, it's best to park where we always do. It's better for the car."
2 seconds later...BAM!



The pictures don't really show how bad it was, but it will give you some idea.

So basically, this really great driver....(heavy sarcasm)...
decided that reversing in a slow fashion while looking for other drivers while reversing isn't really necessary. Rather, it's apparently a better idea to slam on the gas in reverse. Thus, hitting Pearl was the result. Here's a good view of how quickly I was able to stop because I was going so slow (approx 10-15 mph). The white camaro is the car that hit me.
It's not very clear in that photo, but I'm actually still somewhat behind the Mustang, which is the car just next to the Camaro that hit me. The driver couldn't even see over the Toyota Tundra next to him, but he still gunned it in reverse.

Here's some more photos show my position in the accident.


Here's some more pictures of Pearl's wounds. (Yes, I take our car purchases seriously.)

Looking from the back of the car towards the front. He actually bent the frame of the door on the passenger's front door. He scratched and dented up the back door pretty well. You can see, in this picture, the damage to the back fender as well.
This picture shows, kind of, the damage to the front fender as well.
Lots of white paint and dents on the passenger's front door.

This shows the extensive paint remains on the door.
Ugh, just look at the dents.

Well, all that said, my extreme anger and shaking subsided and I cried...a lot. As silly as it sounds, I'd never been in a wreck, and I was really mad that this guy took that away from me. An accident that was not even my fault took away my privilege to say that I'd never been in a wreck. That hurt really bad.

Henry knows how much my driving record and our vehicles mean to me, so he quickly took care of calling insurance for us. He talked to Farmer's who called us first (Camaro guy immediately called our insurance because he thought the accident was my fault...OMG!). After he talked to Farmers, we called Geico, his insurance. Though this experience was awful, I definitely perked up when I heard Henry say," Ma'am, wait, did you say you all were paying for all of it?" Holy cow!!! The whole time he was on the phone I kept thinking about how we would have to pay our deductable for our insurance ($1,000) which meant that I would basically be stealing from our house savings! I was so angry that, because of this guy, Henry and I would be out $1,000. However, hearing Henry ask her that question made my eyes light up.

He mouthed to me that Geico, Camaro guy's insurance company, was putting 100% blame on him and they would pay for all of the damages including our rental car! I felt a lot better, though I was still totally ashamed.

Henry was so wonderful (like you all would expect anything less from him) and knew that I was ashamed. Rather than asking me, "you still going to take the car to work tomorrow?" like a normal person might ask, he instead asked, "Hunny, would you like to take Stella to work tomorrow?" Through my tears, I cried more because of his awesome sympathy and nodded my head yes as I laid my head in his lap.

The next morning, Farmers called again to get my statement of what occurred in the accident. After providing my statement, the agent said those same words that made my day. He told me that Farmers was placing 100% blame on Camaro guy.

What a wonderful feeling to know that Geico and Farmers were on my side.

So, while I headed to Vegas, Henry handled the car situation. I'm so grateful. He took Pearl to the doc on Saturday (June 6th) at 8am and got the rent car. We went to Corpus for the week in our rent car, and Pearl was all fixed by June 16th. I was impressed and defintely think Geico is a great insurance company :) I'm sure Camaro guy probably doesn't feel that way...but oh well!

It was $2500 in damages, and they had to order a whole new passenger's front door because of the damage Camaro guy caused.

Nonetheless, I've been driving Pearl from June 16th until now, and I feel somewhat better...enough to be able to share it.

To end on a positive note, as I drove home from work today, Pearl hit 20,000 miles! Yes, I totally took a picture while driving, which doesn't really shed good light on the story above, but I can assure you I was safe.
It's a blurry picture, but you can see the 20000 :) I called Henry and we talked about how, in only 9 months, we've put 20,000 miles on this car. While that might not be good for resale or whatever, I told Henry that showed just how much use we have gotten out of this purchase and that it should show us that it was a good decision to buy Pearl. Imagine if we had put that many miles on a truck! The gas we would have used and spent money on would make us poor, I'm sure.

All in all, Pearl's great and I just have a dented bit o' pride.