I took this off of Kristen’s blog and thought I’d share my experience with my first car.

What was your first car?
Make: 1991 Blue Toyota Camry
Transmission: Automatic

The one thing that bugged me about my first car was the lack of a audio sound system. There was this huge hole in the center of my dash because the entire cassette deck was ripped out of it. I used to carry a little boombox and leave it in the passengers seat so I could listen to music. It was so funny because in the middle of driving, I would attempt to flip the cassette (yes, cassettes were still the “IN” thing back then) over, and I’d end up busting up the cassette while trying to keep an eye on the road. If the batteries ran low, I would attempt to switch batteries at the stop light. lol. I was such a wreakless driver.

The front passenger seatbelt also didnt work since it was electronic, and many of the wires for the electronic parts were fried for some reason. The shoulder strap would not budge from its release postion. When friends rode with me, I would strapped them with the lap belt and they ended up staring at the shoulder strap in front of them the entire drive. There was this one case were a police officer pulled me over, and my friend pretended to be tying his shoe the entire time just so the officer wouldn’t notice my seatbelts were not working! LMAO. We got away with it too.

The car also did not have aircon. On Guam, aircon is a must have. Guam is so incredibly humid that the aircon has to be on when it hits the peak hours of the day. The heat and the humidity can get pretty unbearable when driving long distances. Anyway, without any aircon, I used to keep the windows down even when driving in the rain. I had to or the windshield would fog up. So after doing this for awhile, MILDEW started growing in my backseat. It was so funny because friends would place napkins or old towels down before riding with me.

Probrably the most embarrassing thing about the car was the “Batman” smokescreen it made while going up steep hills. There was this one time I must have blew enough smoke that it looked like a volcano was erupting nearby. People behind me would be devoured in the smoke coming from my vehicle. Fortunately, there are no real laws about car emissions unlike in states such as California, so I didn’t get cited for a poor emission system.

Another problem I ran into was my transmission. Toward the end of my cars life the reverse blew out. lol. I don’t know how it happend, but it just wouldn’t roll backward anymore. For the next few weeks while attending college, I would park in the most deserted places I could find, or climb over the sidewalks so I could get out of the parking lot. I recall a parking security officer asking me why I climbed the sidewalk and I had to explain that my transmission was broken. He wanted to call a towtruck, but I told him that I couldn’t afford to pay for one. It was so embarrassing, yet very funny.

After a few weeks of doing this, I finally asked my dad to get the transmission fixed. I found out later that that wasn’t the worst of my problems. The biggest issue I had were my extremely bald tires. I found this out the hard way. Early one morning I decided to pick up my girlfriend (now my wife) to get my registration done for the next semester at the university. I never made it to her house. My rear tire hit the edge of the road, my car spun out of control on the wet grass, and my car and I literally flew into the jungle across the roadside. When it was over, the car was completely upside down and I was hanging by my seatbelt. Fortunately, I walked out of the car with just a couple cuts and bruises. The car managed to protect me.

That was the last time I ever drove that car. It was towed into my front yard, and sat there for several years. I eventually bought a new car with money I had saved and a stipend from my college scholarship, but I will never forget the adventures I experienced with my first car. Some of the funniest and scariest moments of my life happened in that super powered vehicle.

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