A lot has changed with our car situation in the last 2 weeks. Here's some background on my dad's love for cars and then I'll get into allthat's happened recently! My dad loves cars. He has liked cars since a young age and in high school he started hanging out with a fellow car lover and they fixed up cars together. Since then, he's raced cars for fun. He raced an RX7. He started to become one of the best in his league, but to move up in racing it would cost more money. It wasn't worth it to him so he stopped racing almost 2 years ago. Ironically, he crashed his car during his final race. He sold it for parts and moved on.
I appreciate my dad so much because he chooses to do what's best for us all the time. He could've kept racing, but it cost money and took time away from us. He could also drive cool cars, but instead we have cars that suit our needs best. He serves us by sacrificing his desires for ours.
He is all about the uniqueness and the character of a car. He's been driving a silver suburban because we needed a big car for trips, and that has no character at all. But when it came time for me to start driving, I decided my dream car would be an old land cruiser. My dad has an old white one that he hasnt had time to fix up. You can't drive it all all, in fact you can't even sit in it cause the seats are gone. It needs a lot of work. But we started looking at land cruisers that were in good condition and running well online and I thought they were the coolest things ever!
I thought I'd be buying my own car, at least half of it, and a land cruiser was out of the question. Then one day my dad came home from Colorado with a 1976 sea foam green land cruiser! I was 15 and only had my restricted permit. I was so excited! I called her Jane. Since then, it started having problems. My dad worked on it a ton! He spent a lot of money replacing parts. We then referred to her as Junkyard Jane. My dad got it working well again. It broke down a few times. So I drove the car on and off from my freshman year of high school until the end of my senior year. I drove it my whole senior year and loved it! It's a manual which was stressful to learn at first, but now I love it!
We recently sold Jane to a family in Branson. It was sad to see her go. I loved how people could spot me in my car so easily. I liked having a unique car and the color was fantastic! My aunt bought a 1978 landcruiser in red a few years ago and was having some problems with it, so we drove to Dallas last weekend and bought that land cruiser from her. Knowing that we would be getting a different land cruiser made selling Jane easier. Our new land cruiser is named Rhonda. While we were in Dallas, we left my dads suburban with a guy who will hopefully get it sold for us. It has such bad gas mileage that we decided to let it go.
I just finished my freshman year at Kansas State and I need a car I can take with me next year. My mom needs the minivan, our little truck won't make it there and back, neither will the land cruiser, plus she gets terrible mileage, so my parents told me they would buy me one more car. This one would actually be mine! All the others are family cars that I'm allowed to drive. But this car would be mine and it needed to have low miles and good gas mileage so it would last me a long time! I imagined this car shopping process would take the whole summer because my dad likes to take his time. But he found a 2012 ford escape for a great price on eBay and I loved the car, so he bid on it. I don't like small cars at all, I've always driven big cars, so this mid sized SUV was perfect. It was in one of my favorite car colors, steel blue, it had low miles, decent gas mileage, and gets good reviews for reliability. It was a sweet find! We won the auction and are now waiting for it to be delivered from Ohio. It might take a few weeks, so until them I'm hoping to drive Rhonda around. We got rid of 2 cars and bought 2 more in under 2 weeks! I'm grateful for my dad and all his car wisdom.
