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I went flying on vacation this last weekend, which was a great trip and spectacular and I will talk about the flying part Really Soon Now.
I drove to the airport to begin the trip, and in the process of driving back, the engine in the Escort died (this was Monday night, June 1). I had the car towed (to Knoxville), and stayed in a nearby hotel, so that if the car was fixed I could just drive it home.
Well...a moment of silence please, because it won't be fixed. It has joined the choir eternal, it has ceased to be, it is an ex-Escort. When they got it into the shop on Tuesday, it cranked, but made really nasty noises. Tuesday afternoon they reported that they didn't get any compression on cylinders 3 or 4, which means that something's broken down inside the engine that spans at least two cylinders.
When my wife and I lived in Illinois, the escort was our one car, since the black Escort EXP that I owned all through grad school had died the day I went for job interviews in Illinois, and Champaign/Urbana is well enough covered by the bus lines that we only needed one car. And we only had a one-car garage so that worked out well.
Right before moving, since we'd just sold a house, we were increasing in income and I found the deal of a lifetime, I bought the Beetle. That was fine; in the new location I would be able to drive the beetle and she would drive the Escort. Manual for me, automatic for her, both driving cars that we picked out to a certain extent.
Not too long after moving here, we bought a Ford Taurus to be the wife-primary-driver and drive-on-trips car, in which capacity it serves very well. So one car for each of us and the Escort as the spare, and the car I drove on work trips (don't have to worry about rain, or salt, and normal mechanics can work on it if it fails).
Well, in 2007, I realized the Beetle was eating one of its valves, so ever since then I've only driven it on short test runs, and I've been driving the Escort basically exclusively.
My vague recollection was that when my wife got the Escort, it had 70-odd thousand miles on it. My first maintenance entry (when I took it to Indiana because my Escort had failed) was at 83921 on the odometer on April 18, 2002. It was our joint car from then until August or September, 2006, when we bought the Taurus, which was about 153000 miles (since at that point it was the third, spare car, the maintenance entries are sparse). The last entry, a few weeks ago in early May it had 189897 miles on it.
So we drove it as a joint car for 4 years and 70,000 or so miles, and then I drove it as my primary car for another 3+ years and another 30,000 miles, and now it's died. It's notable that it's the last of my and my wife's surviving grad-school-era cars, now we only have cars that we've purchased since then as professionals.
I was always sort of lukewarm on the Escort. I prefer a manual transmission, my wife strongly prefers an automatic, and since the car had originally been hers, it was an auto. It was certainly a reliable car, the only really really annoying thing that had to be fixed was the alternator. I drove it to the Oshkosh airshow three times, and another time to Oshkosh for a sheet metal class. I sometimes resented having it as the car that I didn't choose, but I always could count on its reliability.
So...the end of a personal era. Possibilities for what to do now are all in flux, which is always fun and interesting but take up time and concentration. We're at a fork in the road, as it were.
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I think it's indicative of my relationship with the Escort that despite the fact that it has been my primary car for on the order of 70,000 miles, I had to go back in the photo archive to dig up any photos of it at all, whereas I have literally thousands of pictures of the Beetle, which I've only driven 4000 miles. Here's the best ones I could find with a half hour search. These photos were taken as I was setting up camp at Oshkosh in 2007
The smudge at the top of the first photo is the helicopter that makes constant circuits over Oshkosh during the airshow. Here's a snippet of that photo at full resolution to show you.
The photos were not taken to show the Escort, but to show where it was. Likewise, the car itself was not valuable for being itself, but where it took me.