Anna's New Car

Today, we spent hours at CarMax -- where nearly everything that could go wrong, did go wrong -- replacing the dying 2012 Hyundai Accent, which Anna has been driving for a few years now (for the last few months with the check engine light on), with this new (to us, at least) 2015 Toyota Prius:

Goodbye, Leaf!

Today we took our Nissan Leaf to CarMax and sold it back to them.

We bought it back in 2016, almost five and a half years ago, and it was a great car for a long time. Lately, though, its battery--the big one, I mean; the one that makes an electric car like a Leaf go--can't deliver a charge for a long enough drive to make keeping the car worthwhile, especially since we have two Hyundais (an Accent and an Elantra) that have no range limitations, so we decided it was time to give the Leaf up.

Here's Anna pulling out the garage and heading off to CarMax:

Me and My Corolla

Oh, man, that car! It was a 1977 Toyota Corolla that Dad bought new and drove until it was ready to be handed over to me, which happened sometime in late 1983. If you look carefully you can see a 1978 Stone Mountain parking permit on the front bumper. (If you look at my current car, a 2013 Hyundai Elantra, you'll see a 2022 Stone Mountain parking permit on the windshield. Having a Stone Mountain parking sticker on my car is a long-standing tradition with me...but that's a whole 'nother story.)

And look at me! I was young and thin and had my whole life ahead of me. I imagine this was taken only a few months after I passed my driver's license test (thirty-eight years ago as I write this…*sigh*). In the picture I'm not wearing glasses, which tells me this was probably a few months into my eleventh-grade year of school, since that is when I got contacts. I'm wearing the same Junkyard Dog shirt I was wearing in a picture I wrote about a few months ago, the one of me and Scott in Granny's house in Tucker. And it's hard to say for sure, but I think I'm wearing a pair of white K-Mart shoes that had Velcro straps to fasten them instead of conventional laces; my high school friend Kirk Brooks used to call them my Sesame Street shoes.

Not long after this was taken--less than a year after I got my license--I would total this car on Lawrenceville Highway in Lilburn, driving myself and my then-girlfriend Laura to my grandmother's house (yes, the one in Tucker), when I failed to notice that the car in front of me had stopped for the red light. It was terrible.

But that fact doesn't prevent me from having great memories of this car.

Goodbye, Suzuki

I don't usually get that attached to my cars. To me, a car is mostly a thing you use to get from point A to point B -- in my case, point A almost always being home, and point B usually being work or Kroger or Target or my parents' house or Stone Mountain. As often as possible I like my reason for using my car to be to depart from point A without a pressing need to get to any specific point B, just several hours (or even days) to enjoy the trip, be it up U.S. 441 to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and then into Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, or along the Blue Ridge Parkway, or just driving along a random road to see where it goes ("what's around the bend," as the song on my Charles Kuralt DVDs goes). I do expect it to have a decent stereo so I can listen to my podcasts or audio books or music while I'm making these drives, and a cup holder for my QuikTrip almond amaretto cappuccino, but other than that I don't need too much from my car.

But this car, this 2007 Suzuki Aerio, I did feel attached to -- if only for the fact that, since we got it in March of 2007 when I was still 39 (though just barely), and I stopped driving it regularly when we got the Hyundai in August of 2018, when I was 51, it, the Suzuki, was the only car I had during the entire decade of my forties. It drove me into middle age. (That sounds really funny, but I'm going to let it stand.) I've never had a car that long before.

When we got the Hyundai nine months ago, we kept the Suzuki as a sort of spare (yes, for nine months we had a spare car), since we knew CarMax wouldn't give us very much for it, and I thought it would be good to have another conventional internal-combustion-engine car for times when Anna's Leaf, with its limited-range electric motor, couldn't get either of us to somewhere we needed to go. So I haven't been driving it much lately, but at least it's been there, parked in the side yard, and it has come in handy a few times when Anna needed to drive to Hyundai and I wanted to go somewhere farther than the Leaf could take me.

When we got the Suzuki from CarMax back in 2007, it was a year old and had just under 9,000 miles on it. Today it is thirteen years old and has just under 204,000 miles on it. I drove it enough miles to go around the Earth nine times, with relatively few problems (and, to be honest, not that many oil changes either; a darn sight fewer than the folks who wrote the owner's manual would have had me get).

But a few days ago the Check Engine light came on and there was some weirdness in the transmission (though thankfully this happened in the driveway here at home, so I didn't get stranded in a parking lot somewhere), so I decided it was time to let it go. I sold it to a place that gave us $280 for it for parts, which frankly is more than I expected to get. Today a little after noon they came and towed it away. It's kind of a relief to be done with it, to not have to worry for once about how much it will cost to get it fixed, but it was also kind of sad to see it go.

Charging Along

Yesterday Anna forgot to plug in her Leaf (for the first time ever), so today we swapped cars... but I don't think that I can make it home on the remaining charge. So here I am at Walgreens, charging the car, eating a Mounds bar, drinking Dr Pepper, and blogging about it.

Anna's New Car

After nearly fifteen years with her 1998 Nissan Altima--a darn good car, she was--yesterday Anna and I went to CarMax in Roswell, and she bought a new (albeit used) car: A 2012 Nissan Leaf:

So far, we love it, though it has been less than twenty-four hours since we drove it off the lot. It does have a range of only about eighty miles, though, so it won't be our family vacation car. When it comes time for me to get a new car in a couple of years, a Leaf won't even be an option for me.

(In case you're wondering, you don't actually bring the giant yellow bow home with you. It's just for a photo opportunity, then they take it off the car and put it back in a locker somewhere. I was rather relieved by that fact.)