The other day I was goofing around on Wikipedia, and for some reason I bumped into the entry for the Ford Pinto, a completely little econo-car from the 70's. Perhaps more significant was that it was one of my very first cars. So I decided to make a list of all the cars that I/Kristie & I have owned. I started looking for pictures, and that's how we got here.
1984 Honda Accord LX Hatchback
In a way, this is the car that started it all. Back in 1984, my dad bought this car and it in turn, spurred me on to buy my first new car. But it was now 1995 and he was looking to get rid of the car and I was fortunately looking for a cheap, dependable car. We were able to get out of the lease on the Contour and I was driving about 8 miles to my job downtown. The Accord was perfect fit.
By now, it was not the car that it used to be. It was a little rusty and rattlely, but it was still tight and very reliable. It was an automatic and, since we had the Landcruiser, we now had only automatics, a symbol of our "age"... at least to me!
The girls thought it was cool that the windows could be rolled down even before the car was turned on...a testament to their generations lack of "appreciation" for the good old hand cranked car window. It used to be a luxury item to have power windows...and now my kids think it's handy when a car doesn't have them!
Shortly after getting this car, I switched jobs and was faced with a 50 mile (one way!) commute. For 18 months I put 500 miles a week on the old car...never once having a problem. It was 
actually pretty comfortable, much more so than the Contour, once again proving to me the quality of the Honda. It was up over 150,000 miles by now...and luckily I switched jobs again and shortened my commute considerably, now having to only go about 10 miles. One day when I was driving home on the highway, stereo blazing, a car pulled up next to me and pointed down underneath me. I pulled off my headphones and heard a scraping sound and noticed a faint trail of sparks being thrown out from underneath the car. I pulled over and found my muffler completely loose from the bottom of the car. No problem, I just tossed it into the back of the car and kept driving. I never bothered to put a muffler on the car as I was in the "drive it until the wheels fall off mode".
actually pretty comfortable, much more so than the Contour, once again proving to me the quality of the Honda. It was up over 150,000 miles by now...and luckily I switched jobs again and shortened my commute considerably, now having to only go about 10 miles. One day when I was driving home on the highway, stereo blazing, a car pulled up next to me and pointed down underneath me. I pulled off my headphones and heard a scraping sound and noticed a faint trail of sparks being thrown out from underneath the car. I pulled over and found my muffler completely loose from the bottom of the car. No problem, I just tossed it into the back of the car and kept driving. I never bothered to put a muffler on the car as I was in the "drive it until the wheels fall off mode".We hung on to the Accord until we moved to Maine in 2000. I sold it to a friend who used it as his work car and apparently it was used for a number of years until it met an untimely death in a collision. It still didn't have a muffler.