Probably my favorite car to drive, and our last stick shift, was a silver demo 1985 Jetta, bought from Friedman Motors in Des Moines in 1986 for $11,211, with 700 miles on it.
Dan drove it his senior year in high school (1992-3) for his job a Target and super early chorus practices. He didn’t have a car in college, so the Jetta was my car again until 2000.
I’d planned to include all the trips we took in this car, but we flew to England twice and to California once. Our only trips out of state in the Jetta were to Minneapolis and to Kansas City. It certainly was a workhorse around town, chauffeuring a kid to Scouts, school activities, AWANA (at church), piano lessons, taekwondo. (We also traveled to Denver and Milwaukee, but the Jetta was our “old car” then and we drove a 1995 (used) Chevy Lumina, an automatic.)
We gave the Jetta to Dan when he moved to Minneapolis in 2000. After he’d used it about a year, it started having more problems than it was worth. Dan bought his first car and Guy brought the Jetta back to Iowa, eventually selling it in 2004 to a man named Luis for $1.
If you’d like to see the cars we’ve driven during our sixty years together, check this out. Would you believe that the vehicles I mention at the end (this was 2018) are what we’re still driving–a grey 2010 Honda CRV and a used bright blue 2014 Ford 150 XLT!
Guy adopted a 2003 Corvette in 2018, which he enjoyed driving six years. As Parkinson’s advanced, he sold it in 2024.
