Friday, June 20, 2008

She will be missed

When Chris & I were first dating, he had pick-up truck. Nothing special, just a little Chevy S10, but he loved having a pick-up. During the last year we were living in Arizona, his parked truck was hit by an uninsured motorist. We did have full coverage, and since that uninsured motorist happened to work for Chris, he did pay our deductible, but since there had been a loan on it, we didn't exactly have a windfall to just go out & buy a new truck. Plus, by then, we had a newborn & we knew we were going to be moving back to Minnesota soon, so it just didn't make sense to buy a new one at that time.

Luckily, shortly after we returned to Minnesota, we found a new truck for him, a little Ford Ranger. He had that for several years, and still had it when we moved down here to Southern Minnesota. But several months after we moved down here, that truck was also totalled out, this time with me in it.

Now a little side note, although, yes, technically I was driving the truck at the time it was totalled, and technically, according to law enforcement, it may have been a little more my fault than the semi-truck drivers, but really it wasn't my fault. It was Chris' truck, a little bitty white Ranger with rear-wheel drive - not a very good vehicle to be driving in a snowstorm. The only reason I was even driving the truck to work that day was because Chris had wanted to use my car to take the boys somewhere that day (the truck just had the little flip down seats in the back, so if we didn't have to take both boys in it, we didn't). If I had been driving my nice, comfortable, front-wheel drive Ford Taurus, that accident may never have happened. So, really, it's Chris' fault, right?
Or may it was the semi-drivers fault. I may have been going a little too fast for the weather conditions, but that was only because I wanted to get away from that semi...and for good reason, obviously. I ended up with a fractured sternum & vertebrae, he wasn't injured at all. I knew being near a semi in a snow storm was bad news.

But back to the story. We didn't replace the Ranger right away since at the time, we had an old van that was fine for running around town. When the that van died, we had several foster kids, so another truck didn't make sense, so we got a newer mini van. A few years later when it was time to replace my car, I was feeling a little bad about the whole truck situation (even though it really wasn't my fault), so instead of me getting a different vehicle, I took over the mini van & we looked for a truck for Chris.
We tried to be proactive this time, too. By this time we know that we would most likely be getting Caleb placed with us (assuming his bio mom didn't disappear before he was born) so we made sure that the truck we got could seat 6 people comfortably and that it would be able to pull our camper. And we found one. A big, red truck.

Chris loved it! I liked it, too, but it was a little big so I was not comfortable driving it.



Fast forward about 2 years... not only did we get Caleb, but his baby sister, too. Plus, a foster child for a while, which brought our family size up to 8 - too many for us all to fit in a van. So we had to up grade that to a Suburban, since we needed something we could all fit in that would also be able to pull the camper. Then came the $4.00 + per gallon gas. Chris' pretty red truck became somewhat unused. Who can afford 2 gas guzzler's?!

So, it was rough, but he finally conceded that maybe we should look into something other than a truck that gets 14-17 mpg for us to drive when not everybody was with. We ended up with a Pontiac G6, which gets 34 mpg. It is a nice looking car, but it is not a pretty, big red pick-up. Ours is actually Ivory, but this gives you an idea.


It was tough, but Chris is doing well with the decision. The fact that it came with 3 months worth of XM radio may have helped. I didn't have the heart to tell him I didn't plan on signing up for XM once the 3 month trial is over.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My husband has XM - but it is a portable one- he can hook it up in the car and in the house. The service is pretty cheap, and he listens to it all day pretty much.