Fresh Wallaby Juice

Finally saying good-bye to my first car this weekend. It’s about time, since I found a replacement for it a good six weeks ago and it’s been sitting in the parking lot ever since.

(Oddly, it cost more to insure as a second car than it did when it was my only one. Weird.)

I’d had it for nearly 7 years, all through grad school and my postdoc up in the cold frozen North. The cold frozen North had not been kind to it, but it’d been pretty reliable even so…. Until I moved it down to the warm sunny southlands. Was it angry about leaving “home”? The shocks sounded bad, it clearly needed work… and then I found the first patch of rust on the body. Straight into the shop! Ooh, that’s rather a lot of money right now. And there’d still be that rust. You’re – you’re not serious, that’s more than the car’s supposed to be worth…

So I found a new one – new since used-but-recent sedans with good mileage were mighty scarce, and nearly as expensive as new ones. Quite happy with it – a white Nissan Versa hatchback:

So, six weeks without doing anything to get rid of the old one… just lazy? So I thought. And I was sort of reluctant to think of it going to a stranger. I moved around a lot as a student, so by now that car actually feels more like “home” to me than any of those apartments ever did. (Or my current one, for that matter. There’s something about an apartment that feels impersonal.) And there was probably more excitement and fun traveling around in the car than at “home”, come to think of it.

Now it turns out that my favorite aunt can use it. I’m very thrilled it gets to stay in the family! At least, for as long as it runs… One last road trip in it coming up this weekend, as I drive it over to where she lives. Assuming, of course, that it’s out of the shop in time for me to leave tomorrow afternoon. *crosses his fingers*

Tags: car, home, travel