The Pumpkin of Scooby Doo

This is my Subaru. It is a 2001 Subaru (Impreza) Outback Sport which I bought just last month. It's a nice car, and I really like it.

We took this car on our trip to Oregon, all 1500 miles of it. We didn't have a problem on our way to Portland, but we did on the way home.

About halfway between Pendleton and La Grande in Oregon, an odd sort of flapping noise started coming from the back of the car. We pulled over at the next exit, got out, and inspected the car. We didn't see anything amiss. One of my sisters suggested that it might be one of the little mud-flaps on the bottom of my car.

We were satisfied by that explanation, so we continued on with our journey. For a long time, it seemed that that was right, when the road curved a different direction, the noise seemed to lessen or cease, which further confirmed our theory. However, sometime past La Grande the noise started sounding different, or worse. I thought maybe the car was starting to backfire or something, but it wasn't. The grinding, flapping noise was much worse by the time we reached my cousin's house in Boise.

I was really worried about the noise when we stopped but my cousin told me not to worry, that we couldn't do anything about it that night and then we could take a look at it in the morning. When the morning came, my cousin crawled under my car and looked around. He noticed what it was and then had me crawl under it. Part of the axel was messed up. The following picture is of the undamaged part on the passenger side of the car:

So, the picture above is of the good one. These next two pictures are of the broken one. You can tell in the pictures of the broken one that the green part is not attached to the other surface.

At the risk of overkill, the next item is a video of the good side. The piece stays still, but unfortunately the camera moves.

The second video is of the broken one, you can really tell by how much it moves and how much the other didn't move.


I am not the most mechanically inclined, but the rods in the videos and pictures are my car's rear axles. The green colored part is also part of the axle, apparently it is the part that attaches to the rear differential. So my rear driver's side axle was busted. We stayed at my cousin's house on Sunday, and then Monday morning we had a very nervous, harrowing ride/drive to the mechanics.
The mechanic crawled under my car and took a look. When he came up he was swearing in surprise. He seemed amazed that we even were able to drive on it (I didn't tell him that we must have driven about a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles on it). The mechanic got on his phone to get some estimates on parts and much to our amusement he used a lot of entertaining lingo. He asked the person on the other end of the line how much it would be for a 'pumpkin' for an '01 "Scooby Doo." His use of the word pumpkin was for the differential or whatever the thing is called that the two axels go into in the middle.
Anyway, to make a much too long story a tad shorter, we ended up being in Boise for three days longer than we planned, and I ended up missing two days of work. We originally planned to be in Boise for a night, catch a sacrament meeting in the morning and then be in Logan sometime in the afternoon. But, we left Boise late on Tuesday and arrived in Logan early Wednesday morning, but I did make it to work that day for a full shift.
As much as I liked by vacation to the Oregon coast, being back is, well, never mind, I'd still rather be by the ocean! Anyway, after three extra days and $450 later, here is my new axle and differential: