Photography: Garry Armstrong
This is a yarn. A nice story about being able to move from an older to a newer car. It has kept us really busy for the past couple of days, too. Meanwhile, on Friday, Garry’s going to get his new gear.
Life is definitely getting in the way of art!
Side by side, old and newer.
Someone quotable (a friend’s father maybe?) said that the best second-hand car to buy would be two or three years old with about 20,000 miles on it. And by golly, that is exactly what we got.
Parlay in the lot.
To be fair, the car we were trading in wasn’t a piece of junk. Visually, it was in exactly the same shape it was when we bought it three years ago — from the same dealer. We’d only added another 12,000 miles during our three years of ownership making it a six-year-old car with fewer than 60,000 miles on it. Someone’s going to get a bargain.
During the long waits while the car was getting spiffier for us, we spend a lot of diner time.
Parts were beginning to wear out. They weren’t wearing out from hard use. Winter is rough on cars in New England. You can count a cars year as 1-1/2 for each calendar. One winter … and the rest. The Jeep was six-years-old and we still owed money on it. If I was going to owe money, I thought something a bit newer might not be a bad idea.
We needed two things from anything we buy. It has to be reliable and it needs 4-wheel drive. I was beginning to feel we needed a newer car, but it had to be priced at the same cost we were already paying. There’s no “spare money” lying around.
The new one, also a Jeep, is a Renegade in a color Jeep calls “Orange Crush.” The Renegade is a bit smaller than the Patriot, higher on its wheels. It’s also a bit “truckier” and it is from 2015. It has a mere 28,000 miles on it.
It will be big enough for we two, but not good for luggage if there are more than two people in the car.
So, with the shuffling of papers, we got a newer car. This little honey was right on target for us — price and type and even the color. It has almost white upholstery so we’ll need seat covers.
Also, there’s no CD player though there is a connection for a USB machine. I’ll have to see if it works. It even has one of the fancy rear-view cameras to help keep us from banging into things.
We have the newer car. And we got it done before winter, too.
FOWC with Fandango – Being (without Nothingness)
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Categories: #FOWC, #Photography, Cars and Trucks, Daily Prompt, Fandango's One Word Challenge
SERENDIPITY - SEEKING INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH 
I LOVE my Jeep Renegade! I have a 2017 Latitude, but I did hear that the 2015 were great too. I lucked out and had some extra cash so I went for a new model. Before that I was on the lookout for a 2015 because they were getting good reviews in a few trusted sources I was using when shopping around. Enjoy!
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The dealer has tried to buy back our car three times since we bought it. Apparently, 2015 was a good year. She has been good to us.
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I can believe it, the 15 are still getting great reviews!
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I don’t like trading cars because I find the entire process stressful. We traded our second car for a small truck this year – that went pretty smooth. But, now we want to trade our car for one that has just a little more cargo capacity. That’s tricky because we have a smallish garage and the width becomes an issue. So, with all the makes and models on an Excel spreadsheet to the actual visits – stressful. And, I haven’t even mentioned $$. It probably doesn’t help that at our age we remember what we paid for our first house, and it was less. 🙂
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Really neat, Marilyn, looks like you got a great deal and a nice car.
Leslie
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A much better deal than I expected on a nicer car than I anticipated. We did very well. No one more surprised than we are.
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You two deserve it.
Leslie 🙂
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Thank you. I don’t know about deserve, but it is very nice that something actually worked out well for us. We’ve had a rough ride this year.
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Maybe the tide is turning Marilyn.
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Congrats! Great car, great color!
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Drives beautifully, too. It feels NEW.
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Congrats on your new wheels. Orange crush: AKA Denver Broncos Defense. Switching teams?
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Nah. When you have the Pats, you need to hang with them. Even with Brady getting old — and no matter how good he looks, he isn’t any kind of kid anymore — but the Pats were our team before they began to win, just like the Sox were our team when they were 89-year losers.
But Garry LOVES bright-colored cars. He had a bright orange Dodge Challenger ragtop for more than 20 years and a yellow care (recently) for another 10. He doesn’t WEAR bright clothing much, except for ties — when he wore ties. Talk about the OLD days!
I like bright colors too … but not inside so much. I like bright flowers and cars and garden toys, but I don’t want to wear them. Maybe I’ll dye the dogs hot pink?
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That USB is an awesome option. I have one on my car radio and it allows me to load a USB stick with hundreds of my favorite songs (MP3s). I can chug listening to my tunes! Just saying …
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Well, in theory, I can plug in anything into it and play anything using it. We just own a lot of CDs, but almost no downloaded music.
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I download everything off YouTube. There are Apps that convert the address to MP3s. It’s legal and free. You can find almost everything on there.
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It just sounds like a lot of work to me, but I think I may have to do it because short of fully installing a CD player, I don’t see an alternate solution. It’s just a pain because we have all of this stuff on CDs. And I don’t have enough time as it is … Oh well.
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For me it’s fun. I’ve had a ton of music over the years, but lost it in travels. Records are heavy. So I put everything on cassettes. Those became obsolete. Now I’m doing MP3s. I wonder what’s next?
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I’m happy for you. Made me think of the one time we bought a new car and the dealer sold it as ‘Sierra Desert’ and for all the umpteen years we owned it to me it was always ‘shit coloured’….. 😉
It got finally sold to a farmer who needed to transport feed for his animals and to get into rough terrain. So, it seems it was a good car! Even though the colour was not…. 😉
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My mother had a diarrhea colored car. I never got the color. It was horrible, but it ran well.
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Congratulations. It looks like a nice car and I bet it will be fun to drive and will handle the challenges that New England winters throw your way.
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It’s a tough little car. Everyone says so, even my kid — but he’s a big Jeep fan anyhow. This one is more like a Wrangler and less like a family station wagon. I think it will do even better than the Patriot, which was lower to the ground and a “softer” drive. It’s just smaller enough though that we are going to have to find other places to store some stuff that has lived in the car.
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We’re looking for new(er) car, so I could be right there with you in this post. Hope we do as well 🙂
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I think we got really lucky. It’s possible that the orange car was not to everyone’s taste, but WE liked it.
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Congratulations. Sounds like it’s right up your alley!
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It certainly fit our parameters very well and the price was right!
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Sweet deal! That’s awesome!
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I go Thursday (providing the goomboo stays lost, it’s made some noises today about coming back. Ain’t happening.) to get Sirius installed in Baby. I really enjoyed having commercial free music and no static from using this service in the rental I used, so I’m going to buy it (or lease it at least..I don’t think you can ‘own’ the thing..like everything else you pay a monthly charge). ‘Round here there are canyons with dead spots, I don’t know and am not interested in finding out how to use an I-pod or that stuff and well it’s a cheap ‘gift’ for me. Congrats on your beautiful new car….may it run many miles and never a problem encounter! 🙂
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Thank you. I am hoping for the best too. The backup camera is a great thing for us. A CD player, though … I’ll have to work on that.
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I never turn my car radio on anymore. I don’t like the distraction and road noise makes the sound bad.
I like very few songs that come out since the eighties. Music U like us hard to find do I leave it off. They don’t play my music much anymore.
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Sorry for the typos. Blame auto correct.
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We have “oldies” station and our music is old I guess. Also, we have a LOT of it on CD. Unfortunately, the car doesn’t have a CD player and we will have to figure out what to do about that.
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Naomi bought a gadget that you plug into the cigarette lighter and it allows you to play music from a USB stick. Very cheap from eBay, Amazon probably have them too.
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Except ALL my music is on CDs, not on a USB stick. I have tons of USB sticks, but there’s no music on them. I would have to transfer all the stuff from the CD — like all 50 of them — onto a stick. The idea is overwhelming. I may not have a choice, but oy vay, what a lot of work. And HOURS,
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It is time consuming. Naomi also has a lot of CD’s and vinyl but these days prefers to download what she wants from iTunes. However as she had already put a lot of her music on her home computer the job was half done. She likes to have music going all the time wherever she is so for her it is something she is willing to spend the time on. Not sure if these things take SD cards as well but the tiresome part is transferring the music in the first place.
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I know. And I really don’t have the time to do it. Thinking about it is demoralizing.
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Anything with fewer than 30,000 miles is good. I have bought cars with twice that many or more and still got a good car.
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This one was a real bit of luck. Who finds cars with such low mileage? And it appears to have been garaged, too. VERY clean.
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I’d heard the same thing about it being best to buy a car no more than two or three years old so as you say as long as you have to owe money may as wel have a better one than you have. It was nice to see photos of the diner again. I remember you showing it to us once before.
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The diner has not changed at all since I last shot it, but I think they’ve replaced the plastic on the benches and maybe renovated the kitchen again. But basically, it’s a big Worcester dining car. The food is excellent!
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Congratlations, new cars are always exciting although I was never a big fan. Something else to get used to. We are happy with ours. Someone scraped a door last week, nothing serious, and naturally the garage were already trying to sell us a new one, but no deal. Ours does well, for what we use it and no problems. Perhaps one day, we might trade it in, but at the moment have no need to. Your new one looks quite attractive and I love seeing the photos of buying a car in the States.
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I was afraid that we were building up to a crescendo of repair expenses. Noises where there shouldn’t be any. Odd knocking sounds and a grinding in the read end. All of these screamed “newer now!”
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I don’t think they make cars with CD players these days. It’s all Bluetooth and iPhone thingy. Good luck with your new car.
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They do, on special order and I’m pretty sure I can get a portable that will attach to the USB port. I hope so, anyway.
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I’m going to get the same car next spring. Hopefully. 🙂 I need a 4WD so I can go places I can’t go with my current car — which I like well enough and would keep forever if it weren’t for that. I’ve done a bit of research and this model looks perfect for me. Still small, but with higher clearance and 4WD and still decent mileage, not that it matters since I don’t drive much. Thank God. I drove enough for the past 15 years for 10 people. I hope you like it!
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I was told this is the car for people who want a Wrangler, but can’t afford one. It handles like a Wrangler but gets much better mileage. I would have kept the Patriot, but it was making expensive noises. Anyway, this one is much more a truck than a car — which I like. I think this went cheaper than usual because it was orange. Orange is not everybody’s favorite car color. It IS Garry’s favorite car color, however.
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Everything I’ve read about them says, “This is IT Martha!” I might not wait until next spring.
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Garry really loves it. I think you would too. It’s very much a Jeep, but it’s the right size and it gets decent gas mileage.
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There’s one down here, 2016, 30k for 19,995. If I were to go to Colorado Springs and search, I’d probably get a better deal.
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That’s a pretty decent price. And if you have a good trade, you’ll have a good deal. These little Jeeps drive like powerful little trucks. Or, as the salesman said, “You WON’T get stuck in THIS.”
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I don’t have a great trade. I still owe $7k on my car. And if I buy it now, it’s no money down. We’ll see. 🙂
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We owed more than $10,000 on ours and with a payoff and some price doodling (they REALLY love selling second-hand cars — they make a lot more on them then on new ones), we finally had to pay $600 and they gave us the rest on the trade. So we came out paying $322/month as opposed to $310.
We were prepared to keep the Patriot if this didn’t work out. Even needing repairs, it was a good little car with just 57,000 miles on it … so it wasn’t a dog we were trying to dump. But I figured a newer model would be a good choice and they were offering particularly high trade-in prices, so it was worth a shot. It wasn’t death and damnation if it didn’t work, but I’m glad it did. I quite like the new one. It feels like a new car.
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Hmmm….
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