The Cavalier

Now that the boys have been gone for several years, we had gotten down to three cars. Donna drives her Chrysler 300. I would drive our 1995 Chevy Cavalier to the USEC plant and if I needed to go much further than that, I took our 2005 Town and Country Minivan. In October of last year, we vacated the plant. I work from home three days a week and work at our Governor's Crossing office two days a week. So, I drive the minivan there. I think I have driven the Cavalier maybe twice since then. One of those was to simply drive it since I hadn't driven it in a few days. A couple of weeks ago, Donna came in and asked "Did you notice the exhaust pipe was broken on the Cavalier?". I had not so I went out to look. It had completely rusted through and broken off underneath. Given the age of the car, it wasn't worth fixing so we made plans to get rid of the car.

Just like when we got rid of our Blazer a few years back, it was like getting rid of a member of our family. I remember when Donna went to pick it out in the summer of 1995. It's the only car we ever actually ordered instead of buying off the lot. I remember the color Donna chose was Hawaiian Orchid (purple to my eight crayon mind). The car got good gas mileage (over 30 mpg). With front wheel drive, it drove really well through the snow. We made several trips to Myrtle Beach in it. It survived a hailstorm in 2004 I believe. We finally bought a minivan once the boys got too big for all four of us to fit in the car. It became Jonathan's car when he started driving to high school in 2006 and became Josh's car to drive to high school after that. Then it became my USEC commuter car. We had put over 211,000 miles on the car.

I first tried the web and found a few local junkyards. I tried sending a message to the first one on the list via their "Contact Me". I got an autoresponse saying "We'll get back to you as soon as possible". That was several weeks ago, so I went to the second on the search result list. I got an initial reply saying they might be interested and I replied asking for a date and time for them to come look at it. I never heard from them either. As a side note, one of the worst things you can do with a web site presence is be non-responsive to people who try to contact you from it. Anyway, I readied myself to contact the next junkyard on the list, when my brother-in-law Steve got in touch with me and said he was interested in it. He looked at it and said he wanted it which made me very happy to find someone to take it off our hands. We went down to the Ballard County courthouse on Tuesday to do the transfer and on Wednesday, he took the car away.

I am glad we were able to find someone who wanted the car, but it still feels like we've lost a member of the family. Maybe I should try not to get too attached to these vehicles...