00 Echo

The day has come. Tommorrow, I will let go of my car that I have had for 18 years. Technically, my dad owned it the first few years, but I drove it, and the most I was without it was about 4 months, for my first semester of my freshman year.

It feels funny to be sentimental to a hunk of metal, but there are so many memories with this car.  It drove me to my first college classes, my job at the library, to soccer practices while I was still living at my parent's house.  It was my work transportation when I worked summers at Hershey Park.  I remember many cries and songs being blared in it, as I sang at the top of my lungs down the highway.

It was how I got home after my freshman year and took a passenger too to get to my big sister's wedding.  It took many trips from PA to TN and vice versa during my college years. It lived through at least 2 tornadoes during these years in TN. One time, some playground equipment suit lifted by tge tornado, dented in the trunk badly and the tornado shattered every window except the windshield.

It survived me getting rear ended on the highway, just before my 21st birthday. It oddly then would be rear ended again a few months after it being fixed.  And then another time when I lived here in OH someone backed into it while it was parked on the street.

I remember the car being towed off the Washington Mall when we took a trip in it with some friends to DC when we accidentally parked too long in a street spot. I remember late nights chatting with my future husband in that car outside his apartment. I remember scarily getting caught on sudden ice on a trip back to OH from TN and spinning out into the median of the highway.

I carted around my first two kids in this car and I loved it. It had this shelf that was a perfect foot rest. I would always drive with my foot resting on this shelf on long drives. This car even had a song written about it by a dear friend.

It was a quirky car with basic features and it still had roll down windows and I loved that about it.  My husband complained that it didn't have intermittent windshield wipers, but I was used to having to have a rhythm with clearing my view so it didn't matter too much.

Its last few years were spent as a commuting car for K at his programming job and he probably enjoyed it as it was the only non hybrid I knew that got 40mpg. Filling it at the has pump was not something to break the bank.

This car was loved and it witnessed a good chunk of our lives and it was good to us. As we donate it, not fully dead, we hope that it can be used by someone else in need of cheep wheels.

00 Echo, you were loved.