This is a series of love letters to the cars I've owned. If you've been following me for a while or you know me personally, you'll know that I can form an emotional attachment to ANYTHING but my cars, inanimate or not, have always been especially precious and special to me.
You will also know that I like to start stories in different places, some at the beginning looking forward, some at the present looking back, and some somewhere in the middle as I try to figure things out.
@ZakLudick and I have just become the very proud parents of this lovely SUV, the Ford Ecosport 1.0 (pictured above), and the last week or two have been an emotional rollercoaster as I let my little Chevy Spark go and move up into the world of an actual adult car.
I must tell you that it's been one hell of a road to get here.
I'm incredibly proud of us as a couple, that we have amalgamated assets and shared risk and budgeted debt to be able to afford this absolutely lovely family car.
But lets go back to the beginning, all the way back, and start the story where I should.
I got my drivers licence in 2003 at the age of 18 (which is the legal age here. I grew up in a ..... to put it politely, broken and severely economically challenged family. We walked EVERYWHERE. Public transport in South Africa in the 1990's was horrible, but I learnt from an early age to commute using minibus taxis and trains. Things improved marginally with the introduction of the MyCiti bus when we hosted the 2010 Soccer World cup, but even now, the routes are limited and South Africa is still an extremely difficult place to navigate safely without a car.
I spent my childhood draped in plastic refuse bags, walking home at night with my mom in the pouring rain after she had finished a 7/7 nursing shift, and walking to school and arriving there so drenched that the school secretary would lend me uniforms from the lost and found box and warm me up in front of the heater in her office before sending me off to class.
I watched my mother work crippling hours and she still had to walk the 5km home in the pitch dark to get home to us girls. My mom never learned to drive. She never owned a car. My father lost everything he owned while I was still very young, so even though I have some memories of broken-down vehicles and borrowed cars, we never had a family car.
In stark contrast, I went to school in an affluent area with affluent friends and was one of only a tiny handful of children who came from homes without cars. When I was younger, I'd watch my friends being collected from school by their parents and the envy was enormous. When my mom could come and fetch me or if my lift club fell through and she had to fetch me, I would wait for hours outside the school for her to finish her shift. Eventually, I started making the journey myself.
It was during these walks that I became obsessed with cars. On a weekend, I would sit on the curb in our neighborhood and identify cars 100's of meters away. I got so good that all I needed was a flash of a tail light or the shape of a bumper or fender to tell the difference between a Toyota, a BMW, a Mercedes or a Volkswagen. I did not know yet how I would do it but I knew one day, I would have my own car.
When driving with my friend's parents, I would watch their every move. The gear changes, the indicators, the mirror checks, and I would mimic them in my mind.
My Dad: using dad logic to hoist a very small Claire into the car
As tragic as my father's story is, my love of cars was also born through him, a man of many talents, and his passion for the classics. I grew up on stories of BM-trouble-you's (his name for BMW's) and Karmann Gaia's (which we discovered, spontaneously combust due to their moronic battery placement).
When I was in my mid-teens I met my 1st long-term partner and was "adopted" by his family. A CARLOVING family. His father was a classic car enthusiast and both my partner and his brother inherited this car-craze-fever. My then-partner qualified as an automotive body repairer and his brother became a mechanic and Father, sons and the mother joined forces to open a unique family-owned classic car restoration garage.
I had hit gold. In my lessons and my 1st few years as a licenced driver, I got to drive everything from Porches to Mercedes to Alpha Romeos and even a Camaro!
My then-partner was a bit of an asshat, to say the least, and even told me that I would never be able to own or drive my own vehicle because I was either too stupid or because I was female (I still am, just in case you're wondering). His father, however, took me under his wing, and thanks to his guidance and driving lessons from an ex-traffic cop, I passed both my learners and my driver's licenses 1st time (it took my asshat boyfriend 2 attempts at the learners and 3 attempts at the drivers - just by the way).
My mother had been sending small amounts of money to save towards finishing my highschool diploma (I dropped out and was not in school at all during this period) which, as soon as I had that driver's licence in my hand, I used to purchase my very 1st car.
I will never ever forget the feeling of getting inside it, sitting on every seat, touching every fitting and realising for the 1st time in my whole life I had something that was entirely mine. And I cried. I cried big, emotional happy tears, and thus my journey began and the real love story came in to play.
Me driving my very 1st car, my Red 1986 Renault 11TS.
In the next few weeks and months, I'm going to take you on a journey of wheel-spinning, midnight-dicing in my Vtec Honda, to figuring out baby seats, breakdowns, 18-wheeler trucks, long road trips, and the traveling Marylin Manson CD, taking you through and introducing you to each one of my loves.
Wherever they may be now, I will never forget them.
You can read @Zakludick's post about our new car here! It's so awesome we posted about it twice 🤣🤣