The Beast Must Go

A few ago years when I bought my house I decided I needed a pick up truck because of all the work I was going to be doing. Being that I had just bought the house I didn’t have a lot of money so I couldn’t justify a second vehicle. I decided I was going to sell my current car and buy a truck. The car sold in record breaking time. I was washing it in front of the house and getting all of my stuff out. As I finished, I put a For Sale sign on it and was going to go down and list it in the paper. Just then a woman walked up and ask me about the car. We took it for a test drive, she made me an offer and I excepted, and then next day she paid me cash for the car.

Now I had no car. I’m in a small town and my work is less than a mile away. I walk to the bank, post office, and market anyway, so it wasn’t the end of the world. My work takes me around town a lot and a few days later I passed by The Beast. It is a 71 Ford F100. I bought it from the son of the original owner. It had a few minor dings here and there, but nothing major, and it ran great. It is a bit of a tank and kind of loud. When I fire up the big old V8 in the morning pets scurry for their lives and small children think the world is coming to an end. It has just been a great truck for the past 3 years or so, and is a lot of fun to drive. I never have to lock it because there is nothing to steal. Insurance and registration run about $25.00 a month, and it has just been so reliable.

The big problem is I paid $2.80 a gallon for regular unleaded gas this morning. There was a Simpson’s episode a while back where Rainer Wolfcastle (sp?) pulls up a new Canionaro SUV. Marge asks what kind of mileage he gets and he replies with a smile and in a thick Austrian accent, “It gets 1 highway and 0 city”. Now, my truck isn’t that bad, but going downhill, with the wind at my back, and nothing in the truck bed I bet I don’t get much more than 7 MPG. Like I said, I don’t do a lot of driving anyway, but most of the big dump runs have been made, and most of the mill work has been done, so it is hard to justify the truck anymore. Not sure what I’m going to get instead, but the decision has been made. The Beast must go. Yesterday I started looking for something else. Sniffle, sniffle.