Looking for some new wheels

My car is starting to die. The car starts fine, but when you push the gas pedal to a modest 35 to 40 mph, it starts to shake and shimmy and something metallic in the engine starts to rattle.

When the noise starts, I normally just turn up the volume on my radio or music app, partly in an effort to drown out the noise, partly because my hearing is so bad. If my car were a horse out on the prairie, I’d have to think about shooting it. If my car were a pet, I’d have to think about taking it to the vet to put it out of its misery.

Now I can’t be too upset that my car is on its last legs. it has close to 200,000 miles and has served me well, it’s kept on going long after I thought it would. I drive close to 60 miles a day getting to and from work. I’m not even counting the countless miles I put on it taxing my three kids around to school or other activities. I’ve put the car through a beating, without a whole lot of pampering.

Want or need

In any event, I’m starting to look for a new car. The challenge, of course, is the choices. I’m not sure where to start. I could look for another sedan. It would be the practical choice, the smart solution since I rack up the miles the way some salespeople rack up frequent flyer rewards points.

But then I see an SUV pull up next to me on the road and I get the idea of buying a truck or SUV so that I can go off-roading through the mountains with the wind whipping through the windows and blowing back my flowing locks of hair. Okay, I’ve never actually gone off-roading through some picturesque mountain, like you see on the television commercials, unless you count the times in my youth when I got lost on some country road and took a wrong turn onto a dirt road. To top it off, I rarely drive with the windows down, I really don’t have much hair to speak of anymore, and I’d probably have to drive a good couple of hours to hit a real mountain, but who cares about the details.

In any event, if I’m going to dream a little, I tell to myself to go all-in and dream big. “Why not a sports car or a convertible?” I close my eyes and envision myself racing out of work each day with goosebumps and the hairs on the back of my arm raised at attention. I imagine zooming in a Porsche convertible through leafy country roads with a huge smile stretched across my face.

While a nice dream, I laugh thinking of the bumper-to-bumper traffic I normally encounter when I leave work each day. I have no idea where all the other traffic has gone in my dream, but it’s still a nice dream.

Decisions, decisions, decisions

The choices obviously are endless, enough to drive a sane person crazy. It goes from A to Z or, in this case, Audi to Volvo, with a lot of choices — Hyundai, Jeep, Lexus, Nissan — in between. This is a long way of saying that I’ll be spending my weekend researching cars, big ones, small ones, and everything else in between, looking to get the best deal possible. I don’t care how long it takes to complete my research, but I need to finish up before my car leaves me stranded.

If worse comes to worse and I need to make a quick choice, I have the perfect solution. I’m going to count out “eny, meeny, miny, moe” like we used to do as a kid to pick someone for tag or hide-and-seek. It worked then, I’m hoping it will work again.