my car

As some of you know, I drive a very old (10 years now!) Toyota Corolla that Jimmy inherited when his uncle passed away.  I love this little car to death.

The first year I drove it was Mac's and my year in SC.  My little Corolla definitely didn't fit in among the fancy SUVs at Mac's school, but I'm not a car person so that didn't bother me.  Then we brought the car to Bogota because we figured from experience that it would be a perfect zip-around car for this city where you get dings and nicks and parking spaces are tiny.  And it has been perfect.  Jimmy's had a driver for 2 of the 3 years we've been here and generally I rode into work with him and took the embassy shuttle home, so my time in the car has been very limited.

So limited, in fact, that I just took it in for servicing before it gets shipped out this week to DC and realized that in the 3 years since it was shipped from SC to Bogota, I have driven less than 5000 miles.  Crazy, right?

We also wanted to get the car deep cleaned before it was shipped, so Jimmy's driver dropped it off this morning at a place near the embassy for a day at the car spa.  They cleaned the engine which now looks brand new.  They also removed all the seats, cleaned the upholstery and cleaned all the gunk out that was under the seats.  The driver took me to get the car on his way back to the embassy this afternoon.  We got there before they'd vacuumed out and scrubbed down underneath the back seat.  All I can tell you is that it was gross.  Beyond gross.  I recognized some Goldfish crackers but there were other unidentifiable food pieces that just made me want to vomit.  It's a wonder we didn't have an ant or cockroach problem.

Just cleaning out all that mess was worth the $100 we paid for the full cleaning.