Look who turned 200,000!

On January 19, 2012 Mike called me from work. 

"Steph, can you drop the girls off at your Mom's and come eat lunch with me? The car's going to turn 200,000!"

Mike wanted to eat a romantic picnic while we drove around the flight line of Hill Air Force Base watching as the odometer turned to 200,000 on our little Chevy Prizm. (We go for broke on our dates these days.)  So I packed Hannah and Ellie up to my mom's and we celebrated our car's mileage birthday with a little reminiscing.

Our car is like our marriage. It just keeps going. Ummm, that doesn't sound right, does it? Well, how about this: It just won't quit! It may have a few breakdowns, but it always makes a comeback. Or, "200,000 miles later and surprisingly it's still going strong." Okay, I give up on the clever slogan comparison. But it is a good car. A great car. And it is a good marriage. A great one.   

One day in October 2001, Mike and I bought a car together. It was $8,000 (the most I had ever spent at one time and Mike too). We bought it from my Uncle Norm. I remember going to his house with Mike to look at it. We weren't engaged yet, but I do think we had secretly set a wedding date for the next June.  The white 2000 Chevy Prizm had about 30,000 (Mike says 20,000) miles on it and seemed to be a good, clean car. 

The day we signed the loan papers we walked across the street from the America First in Ogden and went to a Kmart photo booth to take our picture together, and Mike taped one of them to the dashboard. We both look young and a little clueless (see above, bottom left). We were. 10 years later and we're still a little clueless, but we are older.

When we got our license plate I made up a funny acronym to help us remember it. We'll always be able to remember our license plate number. I would share it here, but it's not really appropriate for viewer consumption. :) Plus I'm sure psychos would somehow find this blog post, use our license plate number for bad and ruin our lives. So, sorry, no slightly off-color license plate acronym for you. 

Until 2010 this was our only car, and we drove it everywhere. It's seen more trips to St. George than we can count; it's carried our bikes all over; we've taken it to Moab; it's been driven to California a few times; and we once drove it up the coast from Cali to Seattle (we were childless at the time). We also forded a small river in it and have driven on many four-wheel-drive-only tracks. 

We've put one major repair into it. When we were living in California for Mike's UCLA internship we had to replace an oxygen sensor. That's it. Oh yeah, and we had to replace a back window and the faceplate on our stereo when some punk broke into it while it was parked in Salt Lake. 

We've added a few upgrades, the radio that played Mp3s (so novel in the early 2000s), a clicker (that Mike wired in to unlock and lock it) and we've (Mike) replaced the door handle once many years ago.  In October of this last year, for safety and emissions, we did have to tape the passenger door handle on. Isn't that how a car should work? The door handles break before the engine.

Here's to another 100,000 miles little Chevy Prizm!

Look at this cute guy. I'm so glad I bought a car with him. 

If you look close, you can see our 200,000 milestone! (And a zit on my cheek. Thank you pregnancy.)