Me vs. my car(s)

I am slowly but surely learning how to repair an automobile. It's out of necessity, really, as I've never really considered myself the type of person to be a mechanic. Strange, because I do consider myself somewhat mechanically-inclined. But that's another story.

We have one car whose trunk doesn't shut. It's been held shut by clothesline and a bungee cord for a few months now, because we haven't really needed to have it fixed. It's served our purposes quite well, and other than that, it's been sitting in our driveway while we make payments on it.

Over the weekend, our primary car (the bigger one, the one that lets us carry both kids have room left over for something else) took a giant poop, necessitating a repair job in the immediate future. It needs a new thermostat, a new water pump, and a new timing panel cover. Or so the dealership told us. We had to shell out $100 for them to tell us what was wrong and that it would take $1200 to fix it if we wanted our car by Thanksgiving. We called a friend of ours who knows mechanics, and he told us to tell the dealer to take a hike, and gave us a number. It's still too early for us to call him, but in any case, we are going to have to take the smaller car to my parents' house this weekend.

Now, I can't imagine the kind of person that would enjoy making a 90-mile-plus car ride with the trunk lid bumping loudly every time the car went over a small hill, but I can tell you that I am not one of them, and my wife DEFINITELY isn't one of them. So, I spent Saturday trying to dismantle the latch on the trunk to see what was wrong with it. I couldn't find anything, but I was able to locate a shop in town that had the part. I just want to make sure that it's the part which is malfunctioning, as there is a slight chance that the body of the car itself could be damaged, and that could be causing the latch to fail.

Re-reading that last paragraph, I realize that it actually sounds like I know what I'm talking about. For someone who has sworn up and down that the only thing I know about cars is to put gas in them before the needle hits "E", this is showing some promise.