Goodbye Old Friend

Nineteen years ago J. and I had five children and drove a smaller minivan. With three children in car seats, the van was extremely crowded. It was also at this point that we started to seriously think about adoption. Our car situation was one of the problematic things to figure out. There was literally no room for another child. 

Enter my mother-in-law. She knew our small van was a tight fit even without another child. Having had full-sized vans for years, she loved them and knew how useful they were. So she and J. went looking at vans. (I don't go car shopping. I bought my first car after college and swore off the activity afterwards.) They found a new 15-passenger van. I was not excited. It was huge! How on earth was I going to navigate that boat through the narrow streets of Evanston and Chicago? It was just too big. And fifteen passengers?? Why did we need so many extra seats? 

I was eventually worn down and resigned myself to driving a vehicle just a few feet shorter than a semi. Once I got comfortable with it, I realized it was great to be up above most of the traffic. The van was super comfortable, and I could take any number of friends along when we went places. 

And those extra seats proved very useful as we added to our family. Our van carted us to and from Arizona multiple times as well as on many other vacations. Taking it to Yellowstone two years ago was it's last hurrah. I'm still not quite sure how it made it up and down the mountains, but it did. 

The last few months were hard, though. There were multiple things wrong that didn't make financial sense to repair, but it was the disintegrating transmission that finally did it in. I only drove it when absolutely necessary and J. needed to continually top off the transmission fluid. I never knew if I would make it back when I left, and the last two weeks it just sat because no one felt it was safe enough to drive.

J. had been doing car research and eventually found a minivan that we could make the payments on and today was the day we said goodbye to the van. It actually felt very sad as the van felt like a part of the family. I know it's just a car, but still...

You can see that time had taken its toll. 

We ended up with a 2014 Honda Odyssey. It has more bells and whistles than any car we've ever had, and the whole keyless thing is going to take some getting used to. 

Hello new friend,

It's going to take some time to make friends, but I am appreciative of the air conditioning and the fact that it moves forward every time I press down the gas pedal.