The Car Thread

[smilingcat]

My younger sister got her car first thanks to mom&dad. She got a CJ5 jeep. I decided to one up her so I bought a four wheel pkup chevy short bed. totally impractical so sold it after 80k miles??? And bought something more proper, a Tercel stationwagon. I loved that car. Sadly it fell apart after 190k miles.

Then came yet another pkup this time a toyota pkup. A come-on in the ad... I actually managed to snag it dirt cheap. no radio, stick shift, hand crank window... It didn't make it to old age as it was rear ended and totalled.

Seeing how badly it was damaged my next car was/is bit more substantial. I currently drive an Audi A6 station wagon. It also happens to be our dog mobile. dawgs love the ride. It has 220k miles and still going strong. yippeee... hope it goes another 100k miles.

[badgercat]

So I don't have any sort of 'special' car, but it's sure special to me. I got my car to transport myself to and from my summer job and then my high school, which was several miles away from home. It's a green '99 Honda Civic which was 3 years old when I got it. My parents and grandpa fronted me the money when I got it, and I gave them 80% of every paycheck for three summers (when I worked 40+ hours each week), and my parents kindly forgave the balance (they didn't tell me what it was) when I left for college. My friends all thought that was a completely bogus arrangement, as all I got to keep from each check was a little pocket money, but I'm grateful that I had to work to pay off that car... unlike some of my prep-school classmates who were given new BMWs and Corvettes for their 16th birthdays and didn't seem to appreciate it at all.

I don't drive often (in about 7 years, I've put about 40,000 miles on it), but it's been so many places... I lived in IL/WI until very recently, and from there, my car went all over IL, all over WI, to Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Toronto/Niagra Falls/Boston/NYC on a road trip with my BF, rural Virginia for a service project, and then a few months ago all the way out here to Arizona where I go to graduate school. I will be very sad to see it go, whenever that day comes, just because of all the places it's taken me.

PS The autocross pic above reminds me... my BF tried to get me to do autocross a couple years back. He used to do it in his little pickup truck, and was quite certain I would have done very well with my little go-kart of a compact car, but I never got up the nerve to do it. I sort of regret that.