Now, if she’d bought her car in 2007, it might not have been so obvious that the company that sent her the “time-sensitive material” — an outfit out of St. Louis called CarSafe — appears to be trying to scam her. Wrote Edna: “Some people may become confused and send these rip-offs money.”
For some reason, Missouri seems to be a hotbed of these bogus auto-warranty scams. CarSafe is one of 10 companies being sued by that state’s attorney general, Chris Koster. Companies such as CarSafe have no connection to the auto manufacturer or a dealership.
“This extended-warranty scam is nothing but a ‘bait and switch’ scheme that preys on consumers’ fears of having inadequate vehicle warranty coverage,” Koster said in 2009, when the suits were announced.
Consider yourself warned.
Spinning your wheels
On my list of Things to Do Someday is bike the C&O Canal, all 184.5 miles of it, from Cumberland, Md., to Georgetown. I mentioned this to My Lovely Wife the other day, and her response was something along the lines of “Ugh. Not me.”
This may be because Ruth has spent the past 10 months atop a bike, living as she does in The Hague. She actually loves cycling, but prefers the smooth, flat bikeways of the Netherlands to what she is certain is the canal’s unpaved, potholed towpath.
Those things don’t bother Cabin John’s Reed Martin. He has biked the towpath 12 times, and plenty of other routes. Wrote Reed: “Words cannot express the peaceful feeling of riding at a comfortable pace and watching the mist rising from the vegetation as you pass.” (On one trip, Reed saw a herd of wild turkeys, 27 in all.)
In fact, as Reed sees it, the only problem with riding the C&O Canal towpath is that you either have to have someone give you and your bike a lift to Cumberland, or you have to ride the towpath twice: there and back.
Oh, Amtrak’s Capitol Limited goes through Cumberland. It even stops there. It’s just that if you have a bike, you can’t get off there with it. A bicycle is considered checked baggage, and passengers may not put it on or take it off the train themselves. It must be partially disassembled — pedals removed, handlebars turned sideways — and handled by an Amtrak employee. Since Cumberland is not a full-service train station, bikes cannot be removed there.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Last year, Amtrak announced that as of Nov. 1, it would have a special car on the Capitol Limited. Passengers could simply roll their bikes on, put them in a rack, then roll them off in Cumberland. Reed and other cyclists were excited about this.
I contacted Amtrak to find out what was up. “We ran into some unforeseen delays,” a spokesman e-mailed me. “Our crews are working hard to get the prototypes ready for testing, and we are looking at a start-up time frame of spring 2012.”
That should give me enough time to get in shape.
Children’s Hospital
We’re one week into this year’s fundraising campaign for Children’s National Medical Center. How much have we raised? About $5,000. That’s a long way from our goal of $500,000 by Jan. 6, but to quote a syrupy 1970s pop duo (a pop duo I have great affection for), we’ve only just begun.
Your tax-deductible donation will go to the hospital’s uncompensated care fund, which pays the medical bills of underinsured children. Please help by sending a check or money order (payable to “Children’s Hospital”) to Washington Post Campaign, P.O. Box 17390, Baltimore, Md. 21297-1390. To donate online, go to washingtonpost.com/
childrenshospital.
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