Your last line resonates with me so much. This is what I keep saying. I was haunting the NAGCA website for about 9 months waiting for the right one to come along. There were a few really nice looking 5.9 limiteds that came along, and those are the absolute top of the breed, made only that final year of the first generation ZJ models. But they were all fairly far away and so the amount of lost time and the expense of traveling at least a whole day each way just to kiss a possible frog kept me from really moving on any of them, until this one came here to me here in CNY but an hour away in Rochester.
But I was haunting that website forever competing with kids almost half my age who were shopping for a decent daily driver that they could lift and wheel. Meanwhile I'm the spouse of a real working doc who is many years out of school and residency shopping for our other second regular car. Most of the time now when I see a ZJ Grand Cherokee the person driving it is between the ages of like 17 and the mid twenties. This is the car that mom and dad are handing down to their seniors in high school or their college aged kids as their first real car. And here I am as both a fan of the breed as well as the spouse of a struggling solo FP driving the same darn thing... This should be one of my "hobby" cars, not what I almost have to get to replace a slowly fading daily driver....
It was really nice to find a Jeep that was just exactly what I wanted, but I also found it very depressing and dishearening too. It's like Nancy and I haven't really made any progress at all. These are simply the well appointed, modern four wheel drive version of our old Dodge Darts that I used to buy real cheap (about $500 bucks) throw about the same into them tightening up a few of their issues and then drive the wheels off of them until the engine had so much blow-by and the plugs fouled so regularly that it just wasn't worth it. Just better to get the next one.
We too tend to own more than one for each of us too. And part of the reason I always like to have at least one extra is it is way cheaper to keep an extra vehicle so one can be laid up now and again until I can find the time or the parts to fix it myself, then to have to make payments that are way out of your league because we still have at least that much med school debt to pay every month, no less business and morgage too.
I think one day many, many years from now after the collapse of the American Empire we are going to look back on days like now and see them like the industrial revolution, the railroad barrons, and other dark days that we think we are so far ahead of now. Back in the early 21st century when we all blindly served our multi-national and Insurance industry corporate masters, when doctors had to buy 10 year old used cars with over 100K on their clocks and send their spouses to the driveway to repair them. This is simply unreal, really remind me why Nancy and I postponed so much and did without, for the absolute lie of some payday sometime off in the future...
Well the future is here now and we are barely much better off than we were before this whole dance started back around 1991. We own a decent home, but it is much like our cars, many years old and needs just about everything, half a roof, a fence, siding and better insulation, windows the whole nine yards, and we have no idea how we are going to afford to pay for any of this. We just hang in there and try to hold on day by day. "She should have gone to Cornell.....
PS: this should be post number 999, sort of makes me feel a little like "The Great One", I'm on the verge of reaching a proffesional milestone....
