Our Jeep
We really hadn't planned on buying a
Jeep that fine, sunny day in June of 2006. We were returning from the
annual
Scottish Games in Wellington and decided to stop at a Jeep dealer in
North Olmsted to kick a few tires and slam a few doors.
So we parked the Saturn and
started looking around. A salesman appeared and without any pressure
took us around to the various
Jeep Liberty models that he had on the lot. We told him what
we were looking for: automatic, 4WD, sunroof, premium sound package,
antilock brakes and tires with a bigger footprint than those
we found on the Liberty we rented in San Francisco a couple of weeks
earlier.
"Well, I think I have one like
that over here," he said, leading us past the rows of Libertys. We
wound our way through
the tightly-parked vehicles to the back row, up against the
parking lot fence. There it sat...a red Liberty with grey trim.
Well, that was pretty much it.
A scarlet and grey Liberty with the options we wanted. We got a good
deal too,
as we got both rebates and incentives that sort of overlapped
between their various sales.
Linda and I headed to the
Longhorn Steakhouse in Solon to talk about our options. We figured,
"What the hell."
We called the dealer and told him to prep the Jeep and we would be in
on Sunday. That night, we cleaned out the Saturn,
put the back seats back in, loaded up Mom and drove back to North
Olmsted. Credit checks were run and papers were
signed and soon we had traded in the Saturn for the Jeep. The final
test was to see if Mom could easily ingress and egress
from the back seat...it passed with flying colors. It was a
lot easier for Mom to get in and out of the Jeep than it was in
the Saturn. The dealer showed us the various features on the Jeep, and
as a final act before dropping the keys ceremoniously
into our hands, we placed a folding army shovel in the back as a
reminder of our problems a few weeks before near Crater Lake (link).
Our new vehicle.
The
The Jeep passed the "Mom
test" with no problems. Claymore, however, didn't get in as gracefully
as Mom did.
Claymore and Scamp in their
new ride
The Jeep has become Claymore's
new playhouse. He loves to hop up
in the back and just hang out. Its his new $20,000 4WD dog
bed.
I bought this bumper sticker
in Moab almost two years before we got the Jeep. It seemed like a good
fit.
The Jeep reflected in the back
of a truck somewhere along I-271.
The Jeep in the driveway
sometime last year during one of the blizzards.
"Snowplow? We don't need no stinking snowplow!"
We drove our Jeep to Utah and
Colorado in 2007 to allow it to express its Jeepiness.
Here we are driving up through Long Canyon on our way to Dead Horse
Point.
A side view of the Jeep taken
along the White Rim Trail with Dead Horse Point in the background.
Returning from Chicken Corners.
A dirty Jeep is a happy Jeep.
I did the best I could to get the Jeep dirty, and was rather proud of
how much I had managed to
get on the vehicle during our time out west. I was really
hoping to return to work after the trip with a thoroughly muddied Jeep,
but heavy rains in Kansas on the way home washed
away two weeks of hard work, including my mud handprints.
Somewhere along the Last
Dollar Road near Telluride, Colorado.
November 2008...new
tires! General Grabber AT2's, supposedly a good
all terrain tire that does well on roads, dirt, slickrock and snow.
Not so good in mud, however. I had driven them a total of five miles
before we got stuck in the mud.
Self extraction wasn't gonna happen.
Fortuately, I was
able to enlist the help of my neighbor, John, and two of his Belgian
draft horses.
Heave ho!
Extraction
complete.
