Now for the backstory on the MPV. Sorry in advance for the lack of pictures here, but they’re still sealed as part of some CIA investigation from the Iran Contra days…anyways, write your Congressman if you can’t deal with all the words and stuff on this post.
Now, best as I can ascertain from the records, this thing was purchased back in the day by a farmer so that he could ferry around his eleven children and for delivering cattle to market. Since it didn’t come from the dealership with the tow package this meant that the cattle had to ride inside with the kids. “Great!” I thought. “I bet it’ll fit four car seats.”
After trading and marrying off his eleven or so kids he got into the ice cream truck business, which meant that this poor old warhorse was left to languish in a pasture on the side of a mountain. Literally put out to pasture. Then after a year or so this farmer discovered that you could sell off things using the internet, and that’s where our stories met.
I was sitting in the delivery room awaiting the birth of my fourth son, and just so happened to be surfing Craigslist…cuz Gearhead. Onto the screen popped this dilapidated nugget, and it was like I just knew that this would be the kind of ride or die, faithful to the end, jump on the grenade kind of steed my family would need in the apocalyptic future we were in store for.
I looked up at my amazingly in labor wife, and she said, “Boy, you better go rescue that mighty MPV before that punk ass Obama ships it off to the Cash for Clunkers furnaces.” Dang…it’s talk like that that’s the reason why we’ve got so many kids.
The timeline from here gets a little hazy, but I do remember that test driving this thing was a bit of an issue. Year old gas, plus an engine that was full of end of service life OEM bits, meant that it was a handful on the country roads around the owner’s ranch. The thing missed, hissed, and bucked about like a pissed off bronco. And who could blame it? It’d been ridden hard, and parked soaking wet in the middle of a bloody pasture for the past year. I’m surprised it didn’t take control of the steering and try to run down its current owner.
I eventually talked the rancher into letting me borrow his big dually farm truck and his trailer to tow this thing into town. I wanted a mechanic to look over the guts to see if there was anything irrepairable. That bastard must have been in cahoots with the rancher cuz he told me it would pass the state inspection as it sat, engine probably just grumpy because of the old gas.
I had a decision to make, and after looking over at that heap of potential, abused and robbed of its purpose in life, I decided to rescue it from the cruel master rancher. Best worst decision I ever made. My wife was gonna be so proud of me after this thing decimated all at race wars…after we proceeded to dump a truckload of overnight parts from Japan into it.
January 2015 | 116,900 miles
