Goodbye Old Friend

Today we sold our 1995 Chevrolet Lumina. We bought it brand new.

Early in 1995 we needed a new car. We started looking around and since we had had pretty good luck with our Chevy Corsica, we thought another Chevrolet might be the way to go. We wanted one just a little bigger than the Corsica, so the Lumina seemed like the right model. We wanted 4-door model. The Monte Carlo was the 2-door model in this body style. While I much preferred the Monte Carlo, the roof line was much lower and I hit my head trying to slide into and out of it. We also wanted a bench seat and the Monte Carlo only offered buckets.

When we were talking to the salesman, he said we might be interested in a particular car because the price had gone up on new cars after the first of the year. It had features we didn’t want and it didn’t have the bench seats but it was cheaper than the comparable cars only a few months newer. I asked him if they had a list of all the cars in the nearby dealerships. He did and he looked around and found our car at another dealership. They trade them among each other so he sent off for it. A few days later it arrived. Just what we wanted.

Despite the fact that we had him go and get just this car and we had no bargaining room at all and that we had agreed to pay the price he quoted us, he still left us to cool our heels in his cubicle while he made sure everything was ok with the sales manager. I hate that. St Patrick’s Day was just a few days away and the newspaper had a coupon that said if we bought a new car on St Patrick’s Day they would give us $500 rebate. I thought we wouldn’t get it because we were just coming in to finalize the deal, but they honored the coupon which was a nice little treat.

Doug, while we were cleaning out the trunk for the new buyers, we found a bag of lead shot that we used for the counterweight of the trebuchet we so unsuccessfully fired off up at your cabin at Deer Lake.

The Lumina was Karen’s car and she drove it to work every day. By the time we sold it, it had 175,000 miles on it and it had a bunch of minor irritations; some rust, a dent, the driver’s side windows didn’t go down, and the air conditioning needed recharging. But it still ran well. A young couple with car fixing savvy bought it and seemed pleased to get it for the selling price of $400. The dealer where we bought our new van said he didn’t even want the Lumina in trade so we figured everything turned out all right.