From ASM826 at Random Acts of Patriotism comes the latest way to waste a few minutes while talking about yourself:
1. What was your first car? Model, year, color, condition?
2. What adventures did you have in it, good or bad?
3. What happened to it, what’s the end of the story?
My first car was the family Volvo 240. My uncle the mechanic rebuilt it from the front end of a 1982 and the back end of a 1984 (or vice versa?), so I'm not entirely sure what year you would call that. Silver, peeling paint, a tiny bit of rust around the wheel wells. It's the car that has been in the family since 1992 or so. My mom drove it for many years until me and my brother got old enough that a minivan was thought necessary for school/extracurricular activity runs. It then sat in the garage until time came for me to get my license, when it became my daily driver.
Three years of me driving it in the High School parking lot resulted in only two very minor fender benders (another car backed in to me; bent their fender pretty good but you can't hardly notice anything on the Volvo, and I sideswiped the garage with it once, turning too soon while backing out). At that point in time my brother was also driving, and he took it over for another two years in the High School parking lot while I went off to college.
When he left for college, the little Volvo sat in the garage, getting aired out every so often on Christmas/summer breaks, until he rolled his jeep (no, not the same one I rolled), at which point the Volvo got a shiny new set of studded snow tires and went off to Laramie with him for a semester until we could find another vehicle more suited for cross country travel.
Just lately the distributor cap went out and it got to be put on to a trailer and dragged off to my uncle again (oh, and there's a picture of it at that link). It now is sitting out behind the garage, as its spot within is being taken up by piles of my textbooks and furniture, awaiting the future. It still gets to drive about town. A fun little car, though I hated the stick shift when I was learning how to drive. Just a few miles short of 200,000 and doesn't seem to have any big issues. The heater works GREAT, being of Scandinavian origin, so I expect it will get driven more over the winter here.
What about your first car?
3 comments:
Volvo. 70's powder blue prom tuxedo blue, very old. It was day VFR only as even after I tinkered with the wiring the headlights were intermittent.
Got a ticket in it once for "impersinating a motor vehicle".
I couldn't sell it or give it away. It got a drive to a nice seaside city when a large hurricane was approaching, and was parked on the boardwalk. Gosh, I never saw it again.
Volvo's are pretty amazing--if you can't sell then, then the only way to get rid of them is by way of natural disaster!
Black 1968 VW sunroof Bug with 16,000 miles on it. $1600.00 in 1969. I wanted an older car, but my Dad insisted I get a new one that would need less repairs.
Drove it to high school and a year into my time at DeVry - it got totaled when a Chevy station wagon made a left turn in front of me and nearly hit me head-on. The Chevy wouldn't run after - the Bug was a mess, with a bent front axle, but I drove it out of the intersection.
I've owned at least one aircooled VW ever since. Worked on quite a few Volvos in my body shop - they definitely are hard to kill - but around Chicago, "skin cancer" was endemic.
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