Disclosure Notice: I have received nothing in exchange for this article. I am reminiscing about my car. I've been driving Hondas for 23 years now. I've driven other makes, but nothing compares to MY Honda.
16 years and 200,000 miles later, the clown car is no longer a member of our family. Why do we call it the clown car? Are you familiar with how tight the back seat of a Honda Civic is? It's tight. When the kids were little and still in car seats, we had the car seat that had to be strapped in sitting in the middle, and the booster seats on either side. Let me tell you, it was a tight squeeze with those kids in the car. There was no extra space between the seats. We did have the Fire Department check the fit of the seats to make certain that they were safe back there more than once.
Because of the phenomenal gas mileage, we would take long car trips with the three kids in the back of the car. We had a portable DVD player that we propped up between the two front seats, and they'd watch movies while we drove. I know you're thinking we must not have driven far like this, but we actually did. Tennessee, Indiana, Minnesota, and Colorado were all destinations with the three kids shoved into the back of the car. (These were the days before we bought our first van. We had another make of sedan as our "other" car.) We had a cooler full of food in the trunk, and we'd stop every 3 or so hours to run around, eat something, and play a little soccer before we got back in the car and started up again. When people would see us getting out of the car with all of the kids, we would hear the comments about our "clown car". When was the last time we piled all three of the kids into the back of the Civic? This summer, when we moved oldest child 3 hours away into his new home at Grad. School. We took both the van and the Civic up, but because we had removed seats in the van in order to fit in all of his stuff, we piled everybody into the back of the Civic one last time when we went to the grocery store. Good times! Good memories!
All three of the kids learned how to drive in this car. Oldest child had the most interesting adventures in learning how to drive. He kept taking his right turns too tight. He would drive up sharply onto the curb and BOOM! The right front tire was popped and flat, flat, flat. The first time he did this, we were outside of the high school. We tried to get that tire off, and we just couldn't do it. This happened at 3, mind you. I called the auto club and we waited for them to show. Meanwhile, people started arriving for the 7:00 showing of the play at the school that night. This became a game of sorts. As people walked by, men would stop to tell us how we should be getting the lug nuts off. About 30 people in all tried to help us, but by the time the auto club showed up, nobody had been able to budge those lug nuts.
The expert from the auto club took a quick look at the lug nuts, pulled a 2x4 out of the back of his truck, whacked the tire a few times, and hey presto change-o, the lug nuts came off! From the time he hit the tires with the board until the time the tire was changed: 20 minutes.
When we got home, we laughed about the board, but we also put a 2 x 4 in the trunk of the car.
Two weeks later, we were taking a turn from one road onto another when he once again popped the tire on the curb. (Still the driver's side, but this time it was the back tire, not the front.) We pulled over into a parking lot and the first thing he did was to whack the tires with the 2 x 4. 30 minutes later, he had successfully changed the tire and we were on our way.
For some reason, he really doesn't like to drive that much.
The things we've hauled in this car. Hondas have very big trunks. They're kind of like the Tardis - bigger on the inside. Once you fold down the back seats, you've got a lot of space. We've hauled drywall home in this car. The trunk was tied down in the back, around the drywall, but we had enough room for the width of the drywall - no problem. We've had really long things that we would fit in by folding down the back seat and the passenger seat.
The most unusual thing we've ever hauled in this car was a gas grill from the store. We were between vans, but our steady old workhorse was still powering through. In order to fit the grill into the car, we folded down the back seat, and then took all of the parts out of the box and loaded them into the car and drove home.
If you can believe it, we wore out two different keys on the car over the 16 years we've owned it. The car was still running like a champ, but the keys wore out and had to be replaced. We finally had to replace the car. Our last trip to the mechanic let us know that for the cost of getting it to run safely, we would have a huge down payment on the next car. So we opted for the next car. I'm really going to miss this little car. It's been there, and it's been a trooper.
We have replaced the car with another Honda Civic of course.
No comments:
Post a Comment