(Semi) Auto-Erotica

My wife and I have a new (to us) automobile. We have come a long way from Kasernenstrasse 2, in 1982 when we had (what else?) a 1973 Vokswagen Kafer, racing orange (which was in hindsight about the only thing racy about the car). I blew the engine up on a trip from Stuttgart to Munich less than two years later and I've never looked at another VAG product since.

Meanwhile, back in the here and now. We went to look at cars last Monday, on Columbus Day, hoping to discover (a terrible play on words) a replacement for our 2003 Subaru Forester XS that had a skosh over 188,000 miles on the odometer.

We got the Forester in February of 2006 a month or so before I had my left knee surgically replaced (I always type it like that as if there were another way that gets done) and I knew with a long rehab that shifting would be out of the question and the Mitsubishi Mirage people had advised me driving their vehicle in first only, instead of using all five forward gears, would do more than just void the warranty.

The Forester was the second Subaru vehicle we ever had-a Loyale front-wheel drive station wagon had preceded it at some time in the middle nineties and I had enjoyed driving that car immensely. The Forester proved to be as bullet-proof as the Loyale requiring no emergency repairs of any kind at anytime and aside from oil changes and other regularly scheduled maintenance blending into our lives perfectly.

In recent months (and years) small failings had started to add up (I fully expect these very same words to appear in my obit, so I'm treading carefully)-pieces of trim had come undone; some rust over a rear-wheel well had made itself known and the electrical connections from the driver's master console for windows and locks worked more fitfully than regularly.

Al at the car store (he told us they don't see 'dealership') had a very late model Forester in his lot, along with at least three of every other kind of car (except maybe Smart of which I saw one), and it was a nice ride but the car next to it caught my wife's eye and I loved the test drive in it. We made no decisions or promises, saying only we would get back to him.

After some discussions during the week and a stop by a really large Subaru dealership to discover nothing on the property that spoke to us, we headed back to the car store to tell Al yeah, let's do the Impreza to discover he was off but since the consultants don't work on commission, it wasn't like Nick was poaching when he helped us. After one more test drive we were sold and wanted to get the purchase process started figuring it would be a couple of days.

Make that a couple of hours. We drove our new (ish) car home that evening and I slept in the vehicle luxuriating in that new car smell for three days afterwards. I of course am exaggerating-it was a couple of hours at most. And despite being four wheel drive, and the house having really wide doors, Imprezas do not fit in the average kitchen. At least not the one in our house. Happy Motoring.
-bill kenny