Farewell to the Mini-van

When I divorced my husband in 2000, I had a four-year old son and ten-year old daughter who had four best friends. The girls traveled in a pack and often went to a youth group meeting on Friday nights. My car was not in good shape and after putting several thousand dollars of repair into it, I decided it was time to go car shopping. Somehow, I ended up with this very sad car salesman. This man had a black cloud over his head - felt like crying whenever I left an appointment with him. His wife had died, his furnace stopped working ... one bad thing after another. He called me to tell me that he had a minivan he wanted me to look at - preowned, in good mechanical shape, just came into the lot. It was a good price and I ended up buying it. When I went back for its first service check, he no longer worked there. With his run of bad luck, he had probably been fired.

The minivan hauled lots of kids around. The five best friends managed to stay together until middle school and then gradually the numbers dropped until there was only one best friend who also was lost in high school. But there were church youth group trips to chauffeur and my son's friends.

And, then there is the carpool. We've grown to two cars now, but in my group, there are five of us who share driving to the Philadelphia office. Sometimes, when people are out on business travel, we combine the two cars into one and being able to have seven in the van is a good thing. Although, I have to admit, my van is not built to hold four men over 6'4" as well as three regular-sized people. On those days if I'm the driver, I generally squeeze into the third row and let one of the men drive my van.

I prefer to drive my car instead of the van and on the days in our carpool when there are only four of us, I drive the car instead. It is also a smaller car and squeezing five in it would be uncomfortable.

The van, however, needs repairs to pass inspection. So I am bidding it farewell. Am trying to donate it to charity - filled out the form a few minutes ago - honestly stating what repairs it needs. Hopefully they will accept it. If not, I guess I explore the junkyards.

Question is now, do I buy another car? The carpool and I will talk about it the next time we are all on board. We've been trying to get our work to buy us a van. They could cover it with advertising to promote our company's consumer products - thousands of people would see it every day on the turnpike. So far, the company has been considering it on and off, but has not been very forthcoming about doing it. They question whether they would be setting a precedent. Our argument is that this is the type of precedent you want to set - we say we are a green company who cares about the environment - why wouldn't you encourage car-pooling?