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0 pointsthrowaway7875443y ago0 comments

"It depends."

My town actually has an E.R. and urgent care. We have a CVS in town too (my town has a lot of stuff!!). There are also medical taxis (there are no regular taxis here) and private hire ambulances that'll take you if you need a different hospital.

Typically you get the number of the closest general doc to you, and make good friends with your neighbors, so somebody can drive you to a hospital right away if you cut your leg off in the middle of the night. Could be a long way off or right around the corner, it depends.

The biggest thing I never anticipated? Car parts. My brakes went and rather than bring it to the local mechanics I tried to fix it myself. Walk into town takes about 40 minutes, getting the right parts took weeks.

Power also went in the spring due to freezing rain bringing down trees. Cell signal went, along with power and internet, and my water well's pump is electric; heat is propane but the damn heater's thermostat went, probably electric too. So being prepared to be off-grid once a year is useful.

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pyb3y ago· 1 in thread

Why did you struggle to get car parts shipped?

throwaway787544OP3y ago

Stripped a bolt. Luckily our town also has an auto parts store (we have a lot of stuff!!) and they had those giant stripped bolt extracting sockets, but no replacement bolt.

Have you ever tried to find the rear brake caliper housing assembly bolt for a 2nd gen Scion xB? Not the slide pins or bracket bolts, the housing assembly that holds the whole caliper onto the wheel. Nobody sells it, you have to get it from a dealership, who's 2 hours away and ships via USPS (there is no way to get there without a car). They then screw up which part it is because nobody ever orders this bolt and the parts diagrams don't label it well. So you wait for a different part to be shipped again. All after getting the normal brake parts shipped and trying to install them which took a week on its own. So about 3+ weeks.

(If you have a second car you could maybe go around hardware stores looking for an identical bolt, but even then the steel and threads may be different, as different bolts have different torque specs due to whether that bolt's threads are supposed to stretch or not in order to bind. These bolts are very low torque even though they are for a caliper assembly)

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