My son turned 16 but I had told him that he’d need to get a job and start paying for things to have a car, insurance, etc.
One thing that the horrors of my 20’s taught me was that this country does a shit poor job of educating teens and college kids about personal finances.
My parent’s didn’t teach me nearly enough on what I needed to survive and I barely got out of my 3rd decade. Hell, I was in major credit card debt and a destroyed credit score until I was in my early 30s.
I wanted to do my best to ensure my son paid for his first car, or at least 1/2 of it, to start to understand the costs associated with living day to day and begin the foundation of what I feel it takes to be a functioning adult.
While yes, my New Beetle should probably have just gone to him, that didn’t happen and it took him extra long to get his own shit together to finally start saving his Arby’s paychecks (with my taking the money and putting it away).
So in the Spring of 2017 we started looking at cars for him and there was this palpable excitement for me in the whole process of it.
Understand, I just am not a “car guy” in any way. While I have loved air-cooled Type 1 VW’s my whole life, I wasn’t remotely into any other cars nor really cared about them. I never understood people’s fascination with American muscle cars, and extremely loud engines and didn’t do a thing for me.
But one thing lead to another, and I realized I wasn’t getting any younger and somehow in July of 2017 I decided to finally get myself the Beetle I had wanted since mine was towed away that fateful day 23 years earlier.
I found myself spending late nights on the internet trying to figure how the whole VW air-cooled world of 2017. I mean, in those 23 years things had changed so dramatically and so did the prices. The chance of finding a cheap solid car was quickly made apparent to me – it just wasn’t the world I had known.
The printed VW magazines were gone, replaced with a world of internet sites and now there were all these online stores and specialty places for things.
In a matter of weeks I pretty much said to myself that I was not getting any younger and what the hell… I wanted something that I wanted to finally have!
And I found myself in Perrysburg, OH with a shitload of cash buying a survivor 1979 Super Beetle Cabriolet.
I knew it from the moment the previous owner let me drive it that it was mine.
I had never wanted a cabriolet, but there I was finding myself buying one and paying top dollar for a basically 100% original vehicle with the original paint, original Bosch L-Jetronic Fuel Injection still intact, and almost every single thing on it 38 years old!
I transferred the HOONT plates from my beloved New Beetle to her at the license agency and she was mine within a few hours!