The end of an era!

Today marks the end of an era. I traded my pickup in on a Suburban today.

Shannon and I had been talking and figured with two larger dogs and a baby on the way an old regular cab pickup wasn't the best vehicle for me to be driving. I had actually looked at this Suburban a couple months ago, but the dealer and I were not seeing eye to eye on the price and trade in value. So, being the stubborn person I am, I walked away and figured it would be sold to someone else and I would have to just keep looking for another Suburban. I had been checking Suburban Chevrolet's website and noticed the Suburban that I looked at had never sold and knowing that it had been sitting on their lot since last November, I figured I would give it one more try. It seems that car dealers don't like to have vehicles sitting on their lots for that long, so we managed to make a deal that we were both happy with! So my truck got traded in and I now have a Suburban!

I plan to write a little more about my truck soon, but here are the basics. It is a 1994 Chevrolet K1500, regular cab, long box, 4x4 pickup. I purchased the truck used from Suburban Chevrolet on 08/26/99 and paid $8400 for it. It had 166,459 miles on it when I purchased it. The original owners who traded it in on a new truck and used it from spring to fall hauling a pop-up camper traveling across the United States, so the mile were all highway miles. In the little over 7 1/2 years that I have owned it, I put 121,675 miles on it, burnt through 9,936 gallons of gas for an average MPG of 12.246. The best MPG I got was 17.47 and the worst was 8.43! When I parked it at the dealer today it had 291,516 on it. I was so close to 300,000 but now that I am done with school and won't be putting hardly any miles on anymore, it would take almost another year to get the last of the miles on! The salesman that I bought the Suburban from is the same one who sold me the truck back in 1999 and he says that the truck probably won't even see the lot, that they will just auction it off. I was kind of hoping that someone would buy it locally and get some more miles out of it, but with it going to auction, anything is possible...it might even end up in Mexico!

I haven't really had a ton of time to really get to know the new Suburban, as I write this I have the owner's manual sitting beside me and plan on reading that tonight to start with. For starters, it is a 1999 Chevrolet Suburban 2500 (3/4 ton), it has the big block 7.4L (454 cu. in.) V8 with an automatic transmission. The one thing that I did to it today was fill it with gas...I almost had a heart attack! I was used to my "small" 35 gallon gas tank in my truck, but the Suburban has a 44 gallon tank and was practically empty when I bought it, so it took 40.891 gallons of gas which cost me $98.00! That is going to take some getting used to, but I will be able to drive that much longer between fill ups!

So even though today marks the end of an era with my truck, it also starts the beginning of my "adventures" with the 'burban! (I've always wanted a Suburban just so I can call it the 'burban!)