A Van for all Seasons...

When she started smoking, we knew her time was short.

Our family mini-van "bit the big one" (as my Pa would say) just yesterday, and I write this in her honor. Sure she had problems with her high beams and was already over 250,000 miles, and sure she would lock the doors everytime you tried to unlock them manually...but it was a family fault we were all used to anyways. Kinda like us being used to the fact that Jenkins always wears his "Where is Pisgah?" shirt in public twice a week.

We went to Gatlinburg this weekend, and all the hills and stop and go traffic were more than she could handle. The thermostat apparently gave out on us and the radiator spat out all of the engine coolant, until finally, as Ma informed us, "she blew a gasket." I don't know what that means in van-terms, but it sounds pretty bad.
In her memory, here are some stories she brought to us:

Some six or seven years ago, it was time for the first-ever Fixed Point student retreat. We packed the foosball table in the back of our mini-van (this is Not a suggested way of using the back 2/3rds of any vehicle) and followed the Taunton's van of similar build. We were well aware of the fact that our particular make of mini-van was keen to give up early on the whole window-rolling-down bit, so when we pulled up next to the Tauntons in a parking lot, we opened the door to talk. What we were not well aware of was the fact that the Tauntons had the same problem with their mini-van....just on the opposite side. So we both stopped, both tried our windows and remembered they didn't roll down, and both opened our doors into each other's.
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About the time we got the window thing fixed, we took our yearly trip to Vail, Colorado (this was probably five years later). In fact, I think this was just a few months ago...Anyways, it was time to leave and the snow had just decided to dump itself upon all the roads north of the southern state line. Most other families would have counted their losses and waited for the snow to melt enough for easy access to the highway, but no - not us. We had 23 hours more driving before we got home, and we were not about to let a little snowdrift impede our efforts. After several failed attempts to pick up speed and make it up the hill from our condo, we were forced into the most unusual activity: pushing the van up a snow-ridden slope. Five of us lined up at the bumper while Andy pushed the gas ever-so-slightly. "Slower! Slower! NOWW! Go, go goooooooooooooo!" This went on for some dozens of minutes, which included quite a few face plants in the snow and quite a lot of backwards progress. In the end, though, man conquered nature and our trusty van led us to victory once again.
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Of course, yesterday was not the first time she smoked. Whether it was peer pressure or she was just curious ("just one smoke couldn't hurt me"), she had tried it once already sometime last autumn. This time, she was the beast of burden for our South Dakota/Canada road trip - a trip that would soon be characterized by busted radiators and 12 cups of coffee a day. This was the trip where Mitchell informed us of the genocide of cornstalks, where we met the world's largest pheasant, and where the border patrol man we lovingly named "Sasquatch" did everything he could to prevent us from making it across the Canadian border. This was the trip where our van decided to die as soon as we pulled into Denny's grandparent's driveway, and immediately began oozing green stuff out of the hood. We left it there and took the grandparent's car through South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and North Dakota before we found out that our friends at the van repair center were in no hurry to get us home. Well, we did make it home in time, thanks to Denny's awe-inspiring one-liners on the cell phone with car mechanics ("We're only missing one piece to our puzzle, and I think you have it."), and some fancy foot work with the new radiator supplier.
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All that to say, this van's been good to us, and we're sad to see it go.