Sudden Decisions

A few years ago we bought this:

I love this truck. It gets great gas mileage, can haul the whole family plus a payload, is distinctive, and is very simple. No electronic bells and buzzers in this thing. The windows are all hand-cranked. It’s a stick shift. I like that basic nature.

Unluckily it has a major flaw. The dealership we bought it from went out of business, and no one in town can get parts for it. I can’t even get an air filter that fits right.

It was supposed to be entirely off-the-shelf for parts, but apparently that shelf was somewhere in China. I managed to track down a web site, and even got someone to email in English with me, but was not able to get either parts or schematics.

In other words, it’s not going to be much longer before it’s scrap.

We have already given our van to The Boy, and are planning to give our “new” car to The Girl when she moves out in a couple of years. That means in a couple of years, we won’t have any working vehicles in the household.

So when Mr. Al came into some money a few months ago, I asked him to use part of it to get a new car. He wasn’t real eager, but when I did the math for him, he agreed. Last night he decided to go look at a car he’d seen advertised. This was the first real day of looking that he’d done. Didn’t matter that it was Sunday, well after hours, and snowing. He thought he could at least get the mileage off the dealership’s sticker.

They were open.

You’ve probably already guessed the rest of this story, but I’ll go ahead and confirm it for you. He came home with a new car. It was the best deal – having 20K fewer miles than the next choice, and the dealership knocked off $1,000 for doing business on a Sunday night.

Now all I have to do is explain to the insurance company why we only want two people on the insurance to cover three cars when there are two teenagers living in the house.