City Wendy recently shared a great post on letting go of her car in preparation for moving to NYC… It got me to thinking about when I moved to the city, and how hard it was to sell my own:

I remember selling my Jeep when I moved to NYC. Kt remembers that Jeep… it practically defined me (in all my Han Solo glory). A Jeep is a car like an F16 is a plane… it’s more than just transportation. When you drive a Jeep, and you encounter someone else on the road also driving a Jeep, you wave at one another. I don’t know why, but you do. Selling it was one of the hardest things I ever did.

I bought it when I moved out of my mom’s house at 16, and it was the only thing I could count on… even when it broke down it was reliable, in that I could fix whatever was wrong with a crescent wrench, a pair of pliers, and a screwdriver. I drove it distances it was never designed for, in weather it performed poorly in, and with more passengers than was safe. I once had a hitch-hiker ask to be let out because he was scared to ride with me at 70 miles an hour.