The Thrill of Driving your Box/Cayman

[CoBeerToad]

In my youth, I used to love to drive. When I wasn’t driving, I was tinkering with my car. Then I ran into a problem car. Two blown motors along with a front end wreck and two years of payments left on it. So the car sat while I bought disposable cars ($500) to get me to work and back. Because they were disposable, I never washed them. I only performed very necessary maintenance. (The brakes are fine even if they grind a little bit). After my junk car was paid off, I started saving that money I was using before when paying it off.

Ten years later, I have $13k saved up. I’m very set in my ways now, of never washing a car or fixing anything that isn’t physically stopping the car from driving. I had a Ford Probe for a while during my disposable car era and I remembered that I loved driving that little stick shift. So I started looking for a real car. A little-ish car with a manual transmission. I wanted something new-ish so only looked at cars newer than 2003. There was not much appealing about any of my choices. I came close to buying a Chevy Cobalt, but “luckily” I had forgot my driver’s license so I was not able to test drive it. The next day, just bored at work, I went back online and cleared out the year filter and the first car I saw was a 2002 Audi TT. Good condition. I thought about that. A convertible. How neat would that be. Perusing down the page some more I saw two 1997 Boxsters. Both with low miles (68k & 72k) for being 1997s. Both were in great condition. And then for the next two days I asked every single person I ran into, “why should I not buy this car?” I needed to have someone talk me out of it. I’m not rich at all. (Obviously, it took me 10 years to save up $13k.) Everyone told me maintenance was going to kill me. I looked up the maintenance costs of the major repairs like the clutch, brakes, and other assorted repairs and the costs were not what I considered crazy. Although I am not looking forward to replacing the clutch when that happens. Also insurance was very reasonable IMO. So I made my decision a week later…

It’s been a year and I still peek into the garage almost every day and am still wowed about my purchase. I have never felt this way about a car ever. Even my first car. I wash it weekly and I have it detailed monthly. I could detail it myself, but I think I just love showing it off to people. I love to drive again. I can’t remember the last time I drove from point A to point B without a detour of some sort or another. There’s a little S-curve by my work that always seem to make it into my route home even though it takes me a bit out of the way. So far, I have spent about $1200 on maintenance which includes badly needed tires and brake pads. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I don’t know if my story catches the spirit of this topic or not, but I love this story and I wanted to share it and I cannot wait to have many more stories to share in the upcoming years.