Seven months ago our red car finally died. It needed a new starter. But we had just put about $900 into it to get it to pass emissions. The poor car wasn’t even worth that much. So rather than incur another X amount of dollars to extend the poor things life, we decided to be done with her. We bought our new Toyota Camry.
First we gave her to a friend of ours, who is here going to school from China. But it became apparent that getting a drivers liscence, paying for insurance, gas, maintenance, and a parking permit were all a little too much for her.
Then a neighbor said he’d take it. He never did. Then another one showed some interest. Finally last week I got online and donated it to the Kidney Foundation. If you notice in all of our pictures for the past six months that have been taken outside, the red car is in the background. It’s been parked since November, in front of our house. We couldn’t even get it started to move it. Luckily the Kidney Foundation will move it for you.
We bought that little car in the summer of 2002, after we returned home from China. It had 102,000 miles on it then. Now it has just over 200,000. It served us well–it got excellent gas mileage, was very reliable (until the very very end), and had many memories made in it. It’s the car Wyatt took me to the hospital in when I was in labor with Olivia, and he swerved to yell at the missionaries. It’s the car I brought Olivia and Cal home in. It’s the car Wyatt and I both drove every day when we were commuting from down town Salt Lake to Provo, it’s the car that was broken into, and inspired us to actually move from the “Meth Lab Apartment” (no, we are not meth lab peeps, but we did live across the street from one during Wyatt’s first year of graduate school). It was a car that kept us grounded and focused on our goals–the flashy exterior of life was not our focus, but rather the long term financial investments like education, travel, and business.
And now it’s gone. We have a new used car, and it gets more whistles than our dingy red geo ever did. I wonder where this car will take us.