Saying goodbye to an old friend

Soon after DH and I got married, we bought a new 1988 Chevy step-side pickup truck. We were young and dumb and bought it on credit. It lasted us over 20 years. It had 227,000+ miles on it, burned and used a quart of oil every few days, clunked, rattled, had two black eyes, and it still ran. But not reliably.

So this summer, right in the middle of all our moving/remodeling frenzy, DH decided we REALLY needed to replace it when it started getting REALLY unreliable. Being repeatedly stranded by the side of an asphalt farm road in the middle of nowhere in the 100+ degree summer heat was not appealing to either of us. As we didn't yet have enough money saved up for a new truck, we bought a used one with the money we had at that point. And we paid someone to find it for us.

And before someone gets on the "ya gotta save gas and the planet" bandwagon, let me point out a few things. If you do remodeling, or own property with trees, or hunt a lot, you need a truck. You can't haul logs or brush to the dump in a VW Jetta, and you can't get a full sheet of sheetrock or a 50-gallon ice chest in one either (not to mention all the stuff a hunter seems to need to go on a hunting trip; it will fill the back of a pickup truck!). But I digress...

DH has a friend who used to own a car dealership. He still has access to all the dealer databases, so we hired him to find us a truck. We told him how much we wanted to spend, brand preferences, mileage wanted, etc. He found us one in about 10 days and then went and picked it up for us (it was in Texarkana, Texas). Best money we've spent in a while as DH really didn't have time to do all the legwork involved in looking for a used vehicle. That old time versus money equation again - our time remodeling was worth more to us than the money we paid DH's friend.

So now we have a new-to-us truck that is reliable and I had to say goodbye to Old Faithful, my dear old truck (painted Aggie Maroon, no less!) of 20+ years. By the way, the new truck is MINE. The truck is always MINE. DH gets the car; he likes cars better than trucks. Silly man.