Our modest beginnings... (part 3): Cars

Part 1...Part 2

Cars have been a fun part of our early marriage years... especially the first year or so. As mentioned in the last post, our first car when we were married was the 1986 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme (see last beginnings post for picture).

As I mentioned, this car was originally my sister Andrea's car. She eventually gave it to Chris, who drove it around for his first couple years of college during which he was rear ended. This provided him with a nice chunk of cash... which he did not use to fix the car. Because of this, the rear brake light was broken, and subsequently covered with red plastic tape. The latch for the trunk was also broken, so the trunk was held closed with a bungy cord. This worked pretty well... except when I went over any bump and the trunk would pop up then slam down again. That got old pretty quick. When the car was given to me, it would not start, so I had to pump a bunch of money into it. After that, it got an economical 11 miles per gallon. It was a real beauty. However... it was free, so I don't have much room to complain.

This car died when I was driving it to the store one day (a couple weeks after buying our next car)... and a girl walking by had to steer it to the side of the road while I pushed. We left the car there for a good 6 months before having a junk yard pick it up.

This is pretty much what it looked like... but ours was uglier.

The aforementioned "next car" was a lovely mint green 1994 Hyundai Excel we bought from Chris' roommate. I use the phrase "we bought" very loosely... since the whole $550 purchase price was paid through a loan from Chris. I think he had to give us a couple loans like this in our early months. We got this car 2 months after our marriage, and it had incredible features like no radio, no AC, the driver side front window was stuck down a couple inches (thus making it a loud drive... especially on the highway), and the letters H - O were scratched quite largely on the hood. It was a truly classy ride.

Since then, we've owned 5 other cars. None of them have been really new or otherwise super awesome... but they were all about 10 steps up from those first two... so I won't write about them. These first 2 are fun to remember, because of their ghetto nature, but we sure are glad those days are gone!