Today we sold the wife's minivan to a junk yard for $175.
in the words of Rod Farva " she stinks like shit but I'm gonna miss her"
In the end the best vehicle I have owned as far as being reliable and still the only one I have bought from a dealership. Aside from brakes and tires and oilchanges i spent very little on maintenance mostly because I never drove it because it was the wife's car and she was very attached. Whenever she would take my car on a trip i would take hers in and see what was wrong. In ten years it had almost 200,000 miles put on it, leaked a little bit of every fluid a car possesses, had the passenger mirror knocked off three times, hit a highway construction barrel, the rear bumper was held on with a bungee cord, the horn didn't work, the brakes were spongy, the transmission slipped, the sliding automatic door didn't slide, the drivers window was stuck half way down and it was about to rust in half. It also smelled like an old waterlogged out door ashtray with a rotten orange in it. Still it got up every morning and got the wife to work and the kids to school and practices and we have some good stories in that van.
The best story is the first trip we ever took in the van. You might not all make it through but I'm going to write it anyway.
First thing first my buddy Collin should never be allowed to a. Plan anything or b. Give or receive directions. The spiel was as follows. Collin was in a band in STL called the Big Wood String Band. Their bass player knew a guy with a huge open property in southern Missouri where for the last few years he had been trying to start a bluegrass festival. This year when they were looking to do it they invited big wood and asked them for suggestions for other bands to come down and he suggested us. He talked my buddy and I into playing a set with him and a couple other of our college music friends into coming down. I asked if it was something I could bring the family to and he said "oh yeah its families and stuff." So cool we load up the new van with the wife and 2year old ms sun and my hippy man do picking friend Joe and headed to STL. We meet up with the pack of people we are going with, some I knew some I didn't, five cars in all we leave to go down south. All I know is that it is by Steelville which is in an area of Missouri with a million little rivers and campsights, its all hills and windy back roads. What had been billed as an hour and a half trip turned into three hours of five car turn around and back tracking but finally in the middle of the night we see a mail box with balloons on it and head down this driveway. We come to the house and I am hoping we aren't in the wrong spot because it is all big trucks and huge dogs and no sign of a festival. The owner comes out and greets us I get out of the van and ms sun wakes up and let's out a little cry. The guy yells"Holy shit did someone bring a baby to this fucking thing?" I avoid the piercing stare from the wife and give one to Collin. As it turns out the owner was a pediatric ICU nurse very interesting guy. So we meet the kid and he says follow him to where "everything is set up". He gets in the a team van and we follow him through a field on a gravel road the we have to cross a creek that I notice on his lifted van is pretty deep. I ask myself, what would your dad do? The answer to that is of course, drive that minivan through that creek, so I did. We made it across and made our way into an open pasture by a little river and stopped. Its beautiful, huge moon tons of stars but that is it, two tents, a fire pit, four pallets pushed together with some plywood on top. Not a Porto potty or an outlet, nothing. The wife and I get out and confab about our situation. As it was our first trip with a baby camping but not our first time camping we had come prepared for many eventualities. Our companions had not. They were expecting concession stands and shower houses not shitting in the woods. We had an extra tent just in case, food enough that we fed twelve people for two days, bug spray, toilet paper,blankets we got everyone situated and went to sleep to the sound of not that distant gun shots, hoping when we saw it in the light it would be better. Nope. Woke up to everyone but us covered in ticks. The wife had offered to share her bug spray but had no takers til then haha.
We all get up and find Collin and give him the old "dude what the fuck?" He finds the guy and asks where the stage is and whatnot. Remember the pallets and the plywood, see where this is going? So with no idea where we were and not wanting to cross the river again we proceeded to party down as best we could. That evening the crowd from up at the house and another forty people from around the area came down. They hooked up a generator and a 180 mic and we stood on the pallets and played our hour and a half. And then Big Wood did the same, there were no other bands so we all ended up picking the rest of the night swapping instruments and playing standards till everyone passed out. It is known in our family as the tick fest and is what all questionable vacation situations are compared to.
