After moving back to Maine in 1997 and working about 45 miles from home, I was finding that my mini van was using more gas every month than a car payment, so I started thinking about getting a commuter car.
As luck would have it, one winter day I checked the autos for sale section in the paper and found one of the dealers in Waterville was having a sale (ending that day naturally) and one of the cars they had advertised was none other than a 1990 Geo Metro convertible. It was $1995 if I bought it right that second and since I happened to be in possession of my moms credit card... well, she had to come over and sign something but other than that I was finally getting the Geo Metro I had wanted 7 years earlier!
This little 2 seater turned out to be an excellent car and Haley and I had many adventures in it, and at 50 MPG why not? It was 1999 or maybe 2000 when we drove it to Kentucky for a whopping $20 in gas. (At the time gas was .99 a gallon but to be able to say we drove from Maine to Kentucky for $20 is just plain impressive!) We drove it to Pennsylvania too, and to Niagara Falls, and all over Vermont... we even got to sleep in it at the Brattleboro, VT police department parking lot because Motel 6 had screwed up our reservation and there were no rooms available anywhere! It wasn't exactly comfortable to sleep in, after all it was Haley, me and our little poodle/lhasa apso, Winnie, plus a couple of weeks worth of clothing and the necessities necessary for an over packer like me... but the point is, it was a great commuter car and a great traveling car and it was cute and troublefree!
I don't remember exactly what year it was when I first found a Hot Wheels Mazda Miata with graphics all over it resembling a pace car, but I knew I wanted to duplicate it on my Geo Metro. I spent hours and hours designing graphics, studying that Hot Wheel, and ordering from one company after another until I got everything just right. Eventually my car took on the persona of the Hot Wheel and it was definitely an attention grabber, and I needed that at the time.
That poor Geo had it's share of mishaps during my ownership unfortunately. One winter a couple of co workers borrowed it and put the top down which broke the plastic rear window- the winter of 2000 it was parked too close (apparently) to the end of my driveway and the plows banked snow all over it and it froze to the driveway. It was spring before I could move it. I really can't recall how it got the huge crease in the drivers side door and can't remember exactly when I came home from work and found the note "Dear Mom, By now you have seen the Geo..." It must have been in 2002? Maybe? But it seems a certain son of mine had been messing around in the driveway on his 4 wheeler and long story short, it was somehow launched onto the hood of the Geo causing advanced damage. With the inspection about to expire and no money for a new hood, I never really drove the Geo after that. Luckily, I still had the mini van. (incidentally, owning a mini van and a tiny convertible prompted people to say I went from one extreme to another... which prompted me to get vanity plates, the van had 1XTREME and the Geo had 2ANOTHR, they only made sense to people who knew me or when they were parked side by side!)
After a few months of it sitting with a smashed up hood me trying to replace it myself, my brother did take it to his house/autobody shop and after a year it had a new hood, but somehow while there, the frame for the top ended up getting broken. I don't know how it happened- no one ever confessed but someone had tried to screw a couple of pieces of it back together and I noticed it right away. Plus after a year of no use, it needed new tires, and to be registered and inspected and frankly, I had needed another car to drive during it's down time so around 2003 I replaced the decals on the new hood and put a for sale sign on it. It sold right away to a guy passing by who had a pocket full of cash from having just sold a cow.
I try not to have a lot of regrets in my life, I do what I have to do at the time, but selling the Geo is something that I have never been content with. Mechanically it was perfect and in retrospect it would have cost me a lot less money to put it back on the road than it did to maintain the new car I had bought. They only made those little convertibles for 2 years I think, I very rarely ever see one anymore and last year it would have been 20 years old. So yeah, I have often said I wish I still had it.... but.... I hope I at least did something pleasant with the money I got from selling it. Sniff.
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