Driving home...

A few miles into the drive home last night the "check engine" light came on.  The Echo is 9 years old, great on gas and trouble-free.  So I pulled into a parking lot and called the knight-in-shining-armor, who appeared an hour later in the 12 year old Tercel to check the Echo's vitals.  He could find nothing wrong except for the light so he decided to drive it home and follow me driving the Tercel.  The only time I ride in the Tercel these days is when I get a ride home in it while the Echo is getting serviced.  I cannot remember the last time I actually drove it!

It took a little bit of changing gears to get the feel of it, but it started to come back to me.  It's the older car with no air-conditioning and no iPod port, so Tim uses it for his 2 minute drive to work.  I'm no good at multi-tasking so I couldn't safely fiddle with controls after we got under way.  (I don't even use high beam headlights - it's too confusing switching back and forth from high to low!)  As I started to relax a bit, the first thing that penetrated my mind was the non-functioning speaker on the right side of the car, and a pretty crummy speaker on the left, down by my knee apparently.  And what was that music he had on?  There was a weird radio with all kinds of little flashing neon lights our daughter had installed when she had the car during her college years.  I managed to figure out where the volume control was and turned it up.  A radio station having a Led Zeppelin marathon.  I don't mind them, but I'm not a fan.  Oh well, better than nothing.  No moon visible.

Then I started remembering my history in the Tercel.  Fond memories, like when it was new and I drove it all the way to Florida and back.  My friend and I left our kids with our husbands and spent a few days at Disney World - what a wonderful time that was!  And difficult times when my taxi service was in full swing and perimenopausal migraines were more and more frequent, driving to pick up kids from their jobs with a barf bucket in my lap... pulling over to use it...

An hour later we were home.  Wonder what the story will be when we take the Echo to the garage today...  I'm just glad I didn't "spazz out," as my kids describe it when I get overwhelmed and fall apart.  Maybe I'm finally learning to roll with the punches after all...