The Little Civic That Could

This is a tribute to Jessica's car from college, The Little Civic That Could. What it lacks in options (power doors, power locks, center console, tachometer - it's a manual, clock, etc), it makes up with heart. We took it’s 102 horses to the limit and back and it kept asking for more. In the last 3 days, we have it driven up and down hills through the Shenandoah mountains, an ice storm in Dallas and the desert in Western Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. We didn't have a single issue and the Car Trip Gods were nice enough to spare us from getting a flat along the way.

Prior to the trip, it had 139,000 miles so we took it in to get a new timing belt as well as some other minor repairs. The mechanic said that it was in great shape and should last to at least 300,000 miles. If this was my car from college (97 Dodge Stratus), the transmission would of fallen out after the first thousand miles and the engine would have exploded into a ball of flames at the two thousand mile mark. We would have arrived in Hawaii with only the steering wheel.

This was the perfect car for our first cross-country trip (we'll do it again sometime in the future) because it has no frills and gets great gas mileage (39.5 on the highway). We are still in our twenties (for just a tad longer . . . ) so it would have seemed out of place to drive in a nice car. We needed a beater to really capture the essence of the road. I was a little apprehensive before we got the car but once I started to drive it, I gained a lot of respect for it. You don't see too many American cars from the mid-90's but you see a ton of Civics. This is the perfect car for us and I think it's so cool that Jessica gets to say goodbye to her car in proper fashion.

She got the car in college but sold it to her dad when she get a company car back in 2002. Lucky for us, her father has an incredibly hard time letting go of cars (4 BMW's sitting at his house) so we didn't have to risk buying a clunker in Hawaii, only to have it break down 3 days later. This is a known entity and it won't give us any problems. And how cool is it to get your car back from college, drive it cross country and then ship it to a tropical island? Pretty damn cool.