Strange Looks in Our Matrix

I love Toyotas.  My college car was a very reliable Red 2002 Echo in a Stick shift, dubbed the Coke Can.  That baby took us all over on adventures, and more importantly, back and forth between Kent, and Bellingham during breaks and vacations when we were doing long distance. You can fit an amazing amount of stuff in that car, and the best part was our record best for Mileage was 45mpg on the way to Montana.  That car is still going, and is Patrick’s daily driver these days.  It has about 190k miles on it now, and doesn’t leak a drop of fluid.  Patrick wants to see how long it will last at this point.

As the El Camino started to break with more frequency and pizzaz, we knew it was time to add another car to our fleet.  I say fleet, because in addition to the Echo and the El Camino, we also have a fully redone 1968 Volkswagen Beetle that has been in Patrick’s family since it was new.  That is Patrick’s other pride and joy! That was the challenging part about finding a house.  We needed something with a three car garage, because the El Camino and Bug needed to be inside.  My car was either going to be inside, or Patrick was going to be scraping my car if he was taking both stalls. 

After years of research I was hell bent on getting  2005-2008 Matrix.  The tricky part – I didn’t want to over pay, it had to have low-ish miles, be black or blue, a stick shift, and have a sunroof.  It took me years of checking craigslist at least once a week.  In that stretch of time I only found a couple that fit the bill, but we weren’t ready yet then.  I just wanted to know if it was possible to find, and about what it would cost so we could budget.  I found our car 4 days before we were supposed to leave on our 18 day honeymoon to Europe. The car was in Leavenworth, which for those of you not from the PNW, that is about two and a half hours and 2 mountain passes away from the Seattle area.  Did I mention I have terrible and inconvenient timing?  Patrick said we needed to jump on it, and we did.  Apparently no one wanted to drive over the mountains to get it, so they reduced the price.  Bonus, the car also came with a set of newish snow tires on wheels.   It turns out however, that it was on this side of the mountains because they were over here buying their new car. Yay!! That is how we got our first grown up car. 

Coming back from Home Depot with the MGD Boards for our Waintscoting

Our Very Large Christmas Tree. Somehow I got covered in dirt, while Patrick was fine.

Just Driving Down I-5 with our new Interior Doors, No Biggie!

We love our Matrix. You can do almost anything with that car! The front driver seat folds forward, and the back seats lay flat.  We’ve fit 10ft lumber, multiple full size doors, a very fat 8ft Christmas tree, and much more in there.  We’ve even camped in the back of it. We get weird looks from people at Home Depot all the time.  We’ve had people stop us and ask if I was going to ride on the roof. 

While we were waiting on the short sale to come through, we needed to get out of town.  We ended up taking a road trip to Lost Coast Brewery in Eureka, CA.  It was about 12 hours each way. 

We always wanted to take a pilgrimage down there, their Great White Belgian was the beer that we had on our first day, at our wedding, and on countless date nights.  We rolled into town around midnight, and camped out on our air mattress in the back of the car at a KOA campground.  Did I mention we like to do things cheaply?  Coleman makes Air mattresses that fit the backs of SUV’s and hatch backs.  After the road trip, our air mattress ended up like all of ours do, dead and not up for a second round.  We rolled towels into the windows, so we wouldn’t wake up to some random person staring at us in the back of the car. We woke up, broke down our car camp, and headed into town.  After a few circles around Humbolt Bay, and a few spins through town, the restaurant finally opened around 11:00am.  You would have thought we were camping out for the new iPhone.  We tried every beer they had, and their food was amazing!!  We thought we would go back to camp, set up the car again, take a nap, and come back for dinner.  By the time we got back to camp I said, is it wrong that I just want to keep going? We stopped, hit the bathroom, went down the slide at the camp playground, then we were back in the car for 12 more hours of fun! We stopped at the Redwood Forest, which we’d never done, and was beautiful! 

I love our Toyotas, and someday maybe we’ll add another, but for now, we’ll see how long the Echo keeps going!:) Any bets?