'87 Cavalier

So my first car was an '87 Chevy Cavalier 2 door coupe.  it was a cool blue color that seemed to fade into a shadow if you parked it outside the shine of a street light.  Kinda cool, reminded me of Nightcrawler from the X-Men.  Anyway this was one of the funnier cars I owned.  It was a base model so it came with this giant black box called an AM radio.  It was replaced by some AM/FM cassette by Optimus.  Never heard of the company but it played my King's X and Alice in Chains tapes I was into at the time so that's all that mattered to me then.  Well except the fact that the wiring was bad on this Optimus radio and it cut the dash lights out...So at night I had to be really good at knowing how fast I was going.  I got very good at listening to the engine and knowing what gear I was in.  Oh, no worries, headlights and running lights were fine, it's just all the dashboard light was out (no paradise for me I guess).  What else was quirky about this car, well there was no passenger mirror on the outside, that was an option.  5-speed transmission, no A/C (high schoolers didn't need to be spoiled by such luxury) and crank windows.  If I recall correctly it was a 1.9 litre 4 cylinder engine rated at 89hp.  Oh, and there was a bad spark plug that wouldn't come out so I'm sure it wasn't firing correctly, probably reducing the engine's meager output.  Although my beast could outrun my friend's four speed Dodge Omni :)

Ok, so what did I learn from this car?  Well, it taught me that I loved driving.  To really learn to drive a car that has a manual transmission requires you to spend significant time with it.  Unless you know where the sweet spot of the clutch is, you'll need practice.  And I did get very good.  I even taught friends to drive a manual transmission on that thing.  It was a very forgiving powertrain and allowed for some mistakes.  

Even more, it taught me I prefered a 5-speed manual over an automatic transmission.  It connected me more to the machine and I felt I could control the car better.  This control taught me to drive in Wisconsin winter, through snow that gets measured in feet.  I learned about traction, braking and sliding (not drifting, that hadn't come to the states yet) and how you can use the transmission to affect all of these.  

The Cav had things break a lot though.  Little things like the plastic pins that keep the window in the track when you roll it down.  Without them the windows just rotate in a circle and come off track.  That's embarrassing when someone pulls up next to you to tell you something.  I guess I learned that I don't like to be nickel and dimed to death by a car and that reliability is important to me.  Not having a lot of mechanical ability at that age yet I couldn't fix a lot of things on my own.  And fixing things can get expensive.

I got this Cav with 72000 miles on it and traded it in for a '97 Sunfire in the fall of 1997 with 117000 miles.  But I did spend a lot of time with friends, give rides to people, and saw much of the state of Wisconsin.  It got me out of the house when things weren't so good.  I took drives when I needed to clear my head and the mighty Cav took me on my journey.  It even dodged the potato truck when I needed it to.  I wish I had more pictures of it, I can only think of one.   I'll post it if I find it.  Anyway I learned a lot from this car and it prepared me for the next one by giving me a comparison.  I'm thankful to have a vehicle to get me through my life experience (and yes that was a parabolic statment).