A farewell, and a greeting.

A little while I ago I mentioned that I was car shopping.

About a week before Halloween, I was driving home from work and I noticed that my car was kind of rocking while idling. This had happened before, twice. It was usually followed by the check engine light coming on, taking in the car for servicing, having some filter get unclogged and me being a few hundred bucks poorer. Sure enough, I stopped at my dad's house to pick up something, and when I started the car up again, the check engine light came on. I abandoned my car in the driveway and drove my dad's car to the football game that night. (Leading a pep band of less than ten people, woo!)

A few days later, the car went into the shop, and yes, there was a clogged filter, but that wasn't all: The smog protection stuff was messed up and the transmission was leaking. Total cost for repair: $1700.

I'd always told myself that if it would be less expensive to make payments on a new car than pay for repairs on my old one, then I'd go buy a new car. I'd already put two grand into car repairs in the past year alone. Sadly, it was finally that time.

For the past seven years, I have been driving a 1995 Mercury Grand Marquis. My mom had bought it when I was in sixth grade, and it had been relatively unused at the time I got my driver's license. I started out driving it on weekends when my dad would need his bright yellow Caddy, the car I took my driver's test on and also a hand-me-down from my grandfather. (The '88 El Dorado died just after I started college. Dad bought another used Caddy to replace it, and after that, a Grand Marquis. We like familiarity around here.)

Within my first year driving "the boat," I saw it go over to 80,000 miles. This year, it passed 141,000. It survived three years going back and forth to college, and four years going back and forth to Jarret's house.

While I've driven it...

• The windshield's been cracked by a rock once (adding to the crack that was already there)
• The right back window had to be glued shut to keep it from falling down
• The motors for both front windows have been fixed
• A piece of plastic has been hanging off the side for a year and a half
• The ignition column's been replaced
• I backed it into a car parked across the street from my dad's house
• I've scraped the sides against many trees, bushes, and a pole
• (Still not as bad as my mom crashing the garage door on the hood, haha)
• A lady backed into it thinking there was no one behind her at the intersection
• The brakes have been replaced...twice
• The shocks have been replaced...twice
• The horn's been replaced...once
• The master cylinder was replaced, after my brakes almost didn't work (remember, they cut out while I was slamming on them to avoid deer crossing the road!)
• I ran over a nail and didn't even notice the tire was flat until people pointed it out to me (while driving on the turnpike)
• The back window was replaced, after it randomly shattered into a thousand pieces
• The front bumper got knocked off
• The air bag light's been on for the better part of the last five years (started right after the front bumper was replaced)

And I'm sure I've forgotten stuff. Yeah, I've kinda just given an elegy to a car, but keep in mind it is something that has been an integral part of half my life.

When I went out to buy a new car, I only wanted these things for sure:

• Something smaller, so I could park better (turns out, it wasn't the car's fault that I suck at parking, oh well).
• It had to have all wheel drive. The boat only had rear wheel drive and couldn't drive normally on wet roads, and when it snowed, forget it.
• Cloth seats. I hate leather.

And for the first three weeks of searching, I drove my dad's car and everything was fine, and then my brother Bryan got into a fender bender on route 17, and now he's borrowing my dad's car and I spent a week driving Jeff's Murano. Don't like the car too much, but heated seats are nice when it's cold.

I knew that this car buying excursion had been coming for a while, so I'd saved up quite a bit for this. I put most of the car's cost down and financed the rest only to build up my credit history. I'll spare the details of the test driving and absolute frustration the various parties involved gave me in actually getting this all done, but in the end, here it is.

It's a 2009 Ford Fusion. Loaded with lots of cool features. Loving it so far. The boat, after being left in the cold and not being used for a month, has started to make high pitched whining sounds when I start it. It's time for it to be donated. And I, for the first time in my life, will look forward to driving in the winter.