I currently drive a 1996 Jeep Cherokee. It was my first car, bought from my neighbor back when I was in high school, and I loved it the moment I sat behind the wheel. My little red 4X4 took me all over the state, down dirt roads outside of my hometown, and helped move me and my stuff down south when I left for college. Considering it was a decade old when I bought it-- and young men with 4-wheel-drive vehicles typically don't treat them so gently-- it's come to have some issues. The engine had to be rebuilt after I met a puddle that was actually a pond, the interior is a little worse for wear after years of hauling wood and debris, a line to the transmission was kinked after the radiator was replaced, and the suspension is pretty much shot after years of hitting rutted dirt roads and what I had assumed to be dirt roads, so I don't trust its rumbling rattles and obnoxious little quirks as much as I had before. The years and I have not been too kind to my eighteen year old SUV, so I've decided to cut my losses and enter the market for a new car.
I've only ever owned one other vehicle; a 2000 Nissan Frontier. I liked it well enough, except I'd bought it from some shady people in LA County who demanded cash and only realized after the fact that it was a salvaged title and not necessarily what I'd bargained for. I only had it for maybe a year at most before taking up my old red Cherokee again. For all the issues the Jeep had, the Frontier matched them and then some, so it was the best decision at the time to go back to my first car. Now that the Frontier belongs to someone else and the Jeep is no longer a reliable option for a ride, I'm back in the dreaded auto market again.
This last weekend I rode down to Bakersfield with my father to go to the Auto Mall. There are closer car dealerships, sure, but he was familiar with the dealerships down there and he needed to visit his sister anyway, so we made a day of it. I intended to only look at compact cars and sedans; better gas mileage, cheaper to insure, something that wouldn't tempt me to go off-road but still get me to places I want to go. Aside from sales associates swooping down on me like birds of prey on mice things went smoothly and I left Bakersfield with a good idea of what I was looking at to pay and what I could get for my money. After driving the same car for close to a decade and never venturing into the scary world of loans and financing I've come to find a little Kia that suits my needs and sits within my budget.
Now I have the task of getting the down together and factoring the car payments into my budget, which isn't so hard as it is annoying, and I have the task of parting with the old red Jeep. It's kind of a sad thought, thinking about how long I've spent driving it, standing next to it waiting for tow trucks, folding the back seats down for a night of sleep, yelling at it and cooing at it. I guess part of me got a little emotionally attached to the mass of steel and fiberglass after all these years. I'm sure it'll go to a good home where it'll be decked out with a lift kit and extensive work so it can mob through the desert again, but it's kind of sad to know it'll be retired soon for something totally different. It doesn't feel safe to drive in. It gets poor mileage. If it's not leaking one fluid it's leaking another. It's beyond my help and ability to maintain now, though I did my best.
I get the feeling there will be a lot more things to experience once I get an honestly reliable, fuel efficient vehicle. It'll pick up where the old red deathtrap left off.
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