This was not my car. But it looks like it – if it was in good shape.

Today I finally did it. I sold my beetle that I’ve owned since 2001. I actually paid it off in 2005… But yeah that thing. It was my friend and my enemy. It served me well and held up to my many different jobs I’ve bounced around to, and I even shipped it to the east coast.

But it wasn’t all sunshine and flowers. I dropped about $5,000 on it in repairs two summers ago, then two weeks later, the engine light came on. I decided to call it on its bluff and refuse to take it in. It retaliated against me in little, annoying ways – headlight going out, griding brakes, dropping the stupid plastic undercarraige, upholstery dropping off, even the dashboard disintegrating. See, this was the kind of dysfunctional relationship we had. I got my revenge in a not-so passive-agressive way – I just stopped driving it altogether when we moved to PA. It sat on that street for three months just pouting and collecting cobwebs.

So now that we have officially decided to move back to California, I realized that the time has come for me and Beetle to part ways. I couldn’t haul it across country, AND I needed to use the cash to finance my trip with the minivan. In effect, I couldn’t leave before selling the car, although we’re leaving things in the storage unit to come back for later.

I arrived here in PA on Wednesday, and have been trying to sell it since. Saturday I took it down to the VW dealership, but they said it was “too rough” for them to take. It had 132,000 miles on it and yeah, she’s kinda banged up. So they refered me to another used car lot down the street – that happened to be closed. I missed it by ten minutes.

I spent the better part of the rest of the day cleaning, vacuuming, scrubing and overall making Beetle look presentable. It was less like a romantic shower and foot massage and more like putting lipstick on the corpse before the funeral. Sorry Beetle.

I knew what i needed to do today, and despite some promising leads, I figured it would be just easier to take it to a used car lot, get a bit of cash, and split town. So after running some errands this morning, I made a bunch of phone calls to see if anyone would take it. I finally found one, drove thirty minutes down there and was rejected just seconds after stepping out of the vehicle. “Jersey Title? Sorry We won’t even look at it.”

Fine. So after a medicating myself with an oreo shake and an Angry Chicken Sandwich, I drove it back to E-town, took care of some more stuff and waited until 6. Oh yeah, the place that was closed on Saturday said that they’d take a look at it at 6:00.

I went back down to York and got the car to the lot – and to make a long story short (TOO LATE!), they took it!! I was asking for $2500 (intentionally high), and they gave me $1500. That’s FINE with me. HOORAY!!

So now I’m going to spend the night here and hit the road on the Big Trip early tomorrow morning. I’m excited. It’s going to be lots of fun and I’m going to visit a few friends on the way. joy joy.

In conclusion (I hate it when people say that! How pretentious!), I will miss the memories of my beetle, and I feel that it’s time to move on. It’s the time in my life for something with more balls (can I say that on here?). Thanks for the memories Beetle! Here’s to the future!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Adventure, Milestone, Nostalgia, Travels, Tyler. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.