About this time last year, just about when gasoline was reaching for the $4.50 per gallon mark Sally and I wisely decided to dump the two gas guzzlers that we had, a Dodge Ram pickup and a Dodge Durango. Each was getting around 12 miles to the gallon and although we had owned the truck for only a year and a half at that point, we hadn't put that many miles on it. 15,000 or so I think, which proved to us how little use it was getting and that we might get away without it. (We had put new tires and brakes in the Durangeo a month or two before making this decision, being the charitable types that we are. Murphy would have a lot to say about that.)
The idea seemed straightforward ___ lower car payments, DMV, insurance, and of course MUCH lower fuel bills. It looked great on paper.
The red Hyundai looked just as sleek as the picture. It ranked #1 in safety, having airbags in the ashtrays, the cup holders, and I suspect, in the seat underneath the driver. Oh, and a fabulous traction control system where if one wheel injudiciously decides to slip on something all four somehow lock up into four wheel drive. Automatically!
Sally unintentionally tested this safety feature one day on that infamous curve on Big Springs road where the black ice lives. She later said that something had "happened" on the turn but she didn't realize until she came home and saw a car in the ditch there that the traction control might have kicked in.
Just about then gas topped out and began sliding back into the comfort zone. And then we each took parttime jobs and for a brief while there it was like playing tag. Sally would run me in to work, come home, and then run back to pick me up. So I'm going, uh okay, we dumped two 12 mpg cars for one 24 mpg but we're running it twice as many miles. So that puts us back to square one, right?
And there were as my wife politely puts it "issues" when it came to hauling things. The Ram you see, had a cargo bed about the size of my own bed. That is to say, it could carry a couple hundred 2x4's, or a pallet of cement sacks, or a yard of topsoil. All of these are hard to do with our Hyundai. Very hard.
The Hyundai Sant Fe comes with a receiver hitch and we briefly thought we could buy a small trailer to fill this need. But ever so gradually alternatives began sounding more attractive: pay for things to be delivered, borrow a friend's truck & buy the gas, hire someone with a truck to do it.
We got to the point where even a $1,000 trailer was not worth it. We found ways to work around most all these needs. In some cases it's do without until the economy gets better and when we can afford to get another truck again.
We plan more now in order to make the most out of each trip but this whole thing has been good for us. It seems time we should learn to do with less and plan more.
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