Out With the Old

On Monday, Michael went to the gym, and when he came out, his car wouldn’t start. Undoubtedly a pain in the ass, but we’ve actually been anticipating this for the last two years.

You see, Michael’s car is OLD. Really old. And when you own a 1996 Saturn with 132,000+ miles on it, you expect that at some point, it’s going to crap out.

Our main reason for not replacing it before now was simply that we were enjoying having no car payments. We both work only a handful of miles away from home, so Michael was really only driving his car to/from work and the gym. For longer trips, we always took my car. We were planning to milk the Saturn as long as possible, and if all went well, we’d purchase a new car in August or early September, just before the baby is born. Well, that day came a little earlier than we were hoping, but again, it wasn’t really unexpected.

The thing is, we actually could’ve paid to get the car running again–it turned out that the problems weren’t even THAT major; it would’ve cost about $180 to fix. However, given that we were planning to replace it in a few months anyway, we discovered that we’d hit the point where it was no longer worth the trouble. Plus, we’ve been looking at Mazdas as a replacement, and as we recently learned, Mazda is offering 0% APR on their loans right now.

On Tuesday night, we shopped around at a couple of different Mazda dealers, figured out exactly what we wanted, and went home to sleep on it. On Wednesday morning, we e-mailed the dealer with the best price, and attempted to negotiate even further. We reached a deal, and during our lunch break, we went and signed the papers. A brand new Mazda was ours for the taking. We just had to wait for it to come in, since they didn’t have our exact model/color on the lot. Booooo.

On Thursday morning, before work, we drove over to the shop to take care of the Saturn and wash our hands of it. Initially, we wanted to donate it to Kidney Cars, but the shop was going to charge us for the towing (which we expected), as well as labor for what they had to do to diagnose the problem (not expected). Since we didn’t want to spend a single cent on a car that we were planning to trash, we decided to take up the shop owner on his offer to waive the towing and labor costs, and give us $50 cash. It was the path of least resistance and didn’t involve us shelling out money for a junker car, so we went with it.

We cleaned out the Saturn and enjoyed a last few laughs at its expense. Now that we were ridding ourselves of it, we could officially admit what a piece of shit it is. I mean, you KNOW you’ve driven your car into the ground when you willingly walk away with nothing to show for it except a $50 bill. HA!

Still, it was the end of an era. Michael has been driving this car since the end of our freshman year in college in the summer of 2001. We’ve been together for eight years, and he has driven it for our entire relationship. It was pretty weird to know we were “saying goodbye” to it, but we were certainly more than ready to do so.

But not without snapping a few last photos, of course!

Next to the dumpster, right where it belongs! It actually looks pretty decent from this angle, doesn’t it? Well, that’s because Saturns are made of PLASTIC. Believe me, this car was a hunk of junk.

Obama ’08, baby.

The driver’s side, with its broken, hanging sideview mirror. In December, a deer ran into the side of the car while Michael was driving it and broke the mirror (the only damage). We had trouble finding a replacement, so, well, it just never got fixed. GHETTO, I know. But oh, how it makes me laugh.

Michael, showing off our “profit” from finally selling this piece of crap. Have I mentioned that the Saturn is most likely flat as a pancake by now?

Goodbye, Saturn. Despite your obvious physical flaws, you were pretty good to us. Thanks for saving us from years of car payments!