[Yesterday: watson road 3.4 miles]<\/p>\n
Our adult daughter has gone through a series of old and nasty vehicles over the last few years.\u00a0 She had an ’84 Ford Ranger\u00a0 (which ended up traversing the Alaskan Highway and finally died in Whittier, AK).\u00a0 Then she had an S-10 of similar vintage.\u00a0\u00a0 Then we bought a late ’90s Honda Accord in Tuscaloosa from Craigslist and drove that out to her.\u00a0 It lasted a couple of years.\u00a0 This summer that one died.\u00a0 She drove a late ’70s Toyota pickup for just the length of time it took to prove that the alternator wasn’t charging the battery.\u00a0 Then I gave her the choice of my ’85 F-150 or ’97 Toyota Tacoma.\u00a0 I had bought the Tacoma online and was thinking she would probably be happy with that.\u00a0 But, surprise, she would rather have the F-150.\u00a0 This is the same F-150 that I had put a new engine in a few years ago.\u00a0 It is ugly but functional.<\/p>\n
Anyway, the daughter had a single-vehicle accident with the old F-150 the other day and hit an off-road obstacle.\u00a0 I’m very glad that she is OK.\u00a0 But the truck has a bit of a phone-pole dent in the front.\u00a0 She has a plan to try to repair it along with a friend from work.\u00a0 And that would be OK if they can do it.\u00a0 I am somewhat skeptical.\u00a0 But I’m not the ‘man on the scene’ so I really don’t know anything, just my fatherly intuition.<\/p>\n
So I’ve been trolling Craigslist and the government auction websites looking at late 90’s pickup trucks.\u00a0 I put in a bid on one in Colorado that would probably be a good replacement and it is near where she lives.<\/p>\n
Well, two thoughts on all of this.\u00a0 First is that you can buy a reasonably OK car or truck for $2-3k off of the internet and it will probably be about as advertised.\u00a0 It may run for a couple of years and probably cost you another $1k in repairs and maintenance.\u00a0 Rule of thumb is $100 per month, more or less.\u00a0 It helps to be “handy” and have some tools and be able to troubleshoot and fix things.\u00a0 If you have to pay a shop $65\/hr (or more) to change spark plugs, things will get pretty ugly, maybe it would be best to go another way.<\/p>\n
Second is that it is hard to buy cars for other people.\u00a0 My children are very gracious about my interference.\u00a0 The daughter in particular has expressed gratitude for vehicles over which she had no say in their selection, color, features, whatever, and I appreciate that.\u00a0 I wish I had the money to just let her go to a dealership and pick out what she wanted.\u00a0 She felt bad about denting the old truck.\u00a0 I told her that the kind of vehicles I buy are disposable, nobody is in love with them, they just do their thing, like a pair of shoes or an old hat.\u00a0 You try to make them last just so you don’t have to be bothered with the time and expense of finding something else.<\/p>\n
We will see about the F-150 repair.\u00a0 Plan B is the auction vehicle out there.\u00a0 And plan C is that I drive to Colorado and deliver this Tacoma to her and fly back (I have paid vacation, she doesn’t).\u00a0 I suppose it could happen that I’ll “win” the auction truck and she is able to repair the F-150.\u00a0 That may leave us with an extra.\u00a0 We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[Yesterday: watson road 3.4 miles] Our adult daughter has gone through a series of old and nasty vehicles over the last few years.\u00a0 She had an ’84 Ford Ranger\u00a0 (which ended up traversing the Alaskan Highway and finally died in Whittier, AK).\u00a0 Then she had an S-10 of similar vintage.\u00a0\u00a0 Then we bought a late […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4683"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4684,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683\/revisions\/4684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}