A homecoming...of sorts

Yesterday we picked up our Subaru from the service department of the dealership where we bought it. We took it in over a month ago because it was making a "strange" sound. Did you catch that...a MONTH AGO! We had temporarily owned an '09 Outback as a loaner vehicle which, over the course of a month, we managed to coat in graham cracker crumbs and put a chip in the windshield thanks to Missoula's chip-n-seal road paving program. So for over a month the dealership kept trying to figure out this strange noise was. After replacing some bearings, the noise was still there so in the end, they replaced the entire transmission. That was pretty disconcerting to us because the car is less than 3 years old and has under 16k miles on it. Fortunately, all of the work they did, along with this transmission, is covered under our original 5-year warranty so we'll see how it goes. One this is for sure: after driving an automatic for a solid month, it took a few minutes to remember how to drive the stick. Then again, I was still forgetting to put the automatic in park before trying to take the key out up for the whole time as well. It's possible that I'm not suited to be driving at all :)