six figures!

no, not my salary. but my car! my echo has finally reached 100,000 miles.

i've been with my echo since before i took my driving test (i used it for my test, as did several of my cousins. you can parallel park this baby ANYWHERE). my parents purchased this car for me in july 2002 with just about 30,000 miles on it. i wasn't in love with it when we got it, but i have no intentions of letting it go until it falls apart. 

i essentially didn't drive the echo for five years while i was in college/grad school, but i did drive it over the summers in between (which was a lot of driving--summer classes that were an hour away, driving to and from camp, driving to and from visiting andy every weekend when we were 2 hours apart in summer '07, etc). it took me where i needed to go when i had my AmeriCorps job (which was all over the state of NJ--and the first week of the program i had a flat tire at the end of our first week of training...).


the echo and i have had some adventures even though it's only been in two states (at least while i've had it)--NJ & PA. it's been covered in snow and has gotten pretty beat up on occasion--in march 2003, i encountered a freak hail storm while driving and my car looked like a golf ball for quite a while. and now with my long drive to work, i've had some tough encounters with salt trucks. andy is going to touch up some paint this summer though, so it will be beautiful.  it's carted me and my stuff to live in various places over the summer, and sometimes it has felt like i lived out of my car. 

in 8.67 years, it's been 70,000 miles. minus the time at school (we'll keep a year in there for all the summers combined), i'm averaging 15,000 miles a year! [hold up, have i really been driving for nearly 9 years!?]

i may not have power windows or doors, but i've got me a tape deck and a CD player and this baby gets 35-40 mpg. 

here's to another 100K more! 


(ps: there is a toyota commercial out there that talks about how many miles people have on their toyotas, and there is a guy who has over 400,000 miles on his. i want that to be me and my echo.)