Rob's car

Last week, we finally said goodbye to Rob's old Toyota Corolla. He has had the car for the last 9 years and it has served us well. The car was 14 years old and has definitely seen better days. The gas pedal sticks, the car shakes a lot when you go over 50 mph, the windshield had a crack in it and the paint job leaves much to be desired. The paint started fading in the last few years and then it started rusting all over. Rob scraped all the rust off and sprayed it with blue rust protectant which was not the same color blue and it looked liked he spray painted the car--not attractive. However, I think the rust looked worse. While personally driving it rusty, I have had many people make fun of it right in front of me. The last straw was the air conditioning which stopped working last October and Rob has continued driving it 45 minutes to work back and forth which is quite an amazing feat in the Florida heat. I really do not know how he lasted this long. He would come home every day drenched in sweat and would get soaked when it rained since he always had to drive with his window rolled down. We finally decided it was time to let the car go. It was a little sad to see it go since it was always such a great topic of conversation. Rob's coworkers especially loved making fun of the car and it always provided entertainment with all the many things that have gone wrong with it(the trunk that would not open and the door handle that broke off) or its mere appearance. Rob liked to have coworkers guess his car by having them pick out the worse car in the parking lot but they never chose his car because they thought there was no way he drove that. Ahhh the happy memories. We had decided to donate the car but before we had the chance, I on an impulse, decided to list the car for sale on Craigslist out of curiosity to see if we could get anything for it. Within 5 minutes of posting it for sale, we got our first phone call and the person wanted to come that night and get it. While waiting for her to come over, the phone rang off the hook and did not stop ringing until I delisted it 2 hours later. We got about 50 calls in that 2 hour span interested in the car. We were shocked! We were also shocked that the very first call ended up in a sale and the car was paid for and picked up within 2 hours of listing it. This proved to us how amazing the resale value of Toyota's are even in the shape our car was in and I mentioned everything that was wrong with it in my ad. I think it also helped to know a family of mechanics bought the car and were planning on fixing it up for their sister so we are happy to know that it will be fixed up.

Rob now has a new car---another Corolla. I guess we are pretty predictable but we loved how much use we got out of the last one so we had to get another and you can not beat the great gas mileage. So we are hoping this one will last us another 14 years.