Cruisin'

Found this in my drafts folder - again with the drafting things and then not posting them until months later! I had written this May 2nd. I will write an updated post to follow.

I bought a car a couple weeks ago, my first. Yes, I'm 25 years old - my 26th birthday is only a few months away - and I have just bought my first car. My sister was probably 18 when she bought her first car, and it was my parents' hand-off. My brother, who is younger than me, bought his first car (actually a pickup) when he was 16. He actually has had 5 vehicles in his possession before I had one... Somewhat annoying, but not important.

So, my car. The search took a lot longer than I (and everyone else) thought it should. I wasn't really sure what I wanted, but I had a few requirements: 4 doors, not red, air conditioning, and I set my budget at $5000 (which was the absolute highest I could go). My dad was helping me in my search, because I really know nothing about buying a car. I like Civics and Accents (I would settle for a 2-door Accent). My dad has a Toyota Corolla which has survived much longer than expected and been good to us, so everyone thought I should get a Toyota. I, on the other hand, have had a crush on Volkswagen for years. If you were to ask me what my dream car was, I'd have 3 answers for you: #1 never-gonna-happen dream car would definitely be the '60s era VW bus (any colour), #2 dream sports car would be '70s era Corvette Stingray (blue or red), #3 plausible dream car - VW Jetta, black, all the way. Everybody tried to discourage me from buying a Jetta, but at that point, we had already test driven one, and I was in love. Not only that, those other cars are pretty popular, so it wasn't easy to find any in decent condition in my price range, meeting my requirements. I eventually found one, less than half of my budget, in really good condition. So I bought it.

The catch? It's a manual transmission. I don't know how to drive a manual transmission. One of my brother's many vehicles was manual, so I had played around with it before and knew the general concept. But in practice? Not so much. I've driven the car on the road probably a total of 1.5 hours, and have stalled it dozens of times. It's proving to be much more difficult than I thought it should be? Maybe not. I guess I just keep thinking, "I know how to do this, why isn't it working already?!"

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