New to me, anyway…..

Sal and I have been driving a 1996 Pathfinder for the last 8 years and it has been a great vehicle.  Best car/SUV I ever had – perfectly suited to this slightly odd lifestyle.

We do half our regular driving on logging roads and some of that is in snow and ice (winter). We do about 125 feet at the last part of the journey at an angle that makes the roadway illegal.  It’s a degree or two too steep to pass ministry standards but the old Pathy handles it with aplomb.  I can usually get a dramatic gasp from my passenger (even Sal) when I plunge over the edge and down the slope to the sea as if a fundamentalist lemming.  The last bit is steep.

And we have two parking spots buried more deeply in the forest than the other 16 or so in the main lot.  Those are the least desired spots because they require some serious clambering into and not all vehicles or drivers want to do that.  Those two are steeper and even more scrambly than the hard slope.  You have to rock-crawl somewhat.  The Pathfinder does that, too.

And we never drive it light.  Every time we went out, we went out with at least half a load of crap and came back with a full-load or more.  I have driven the logging road with 300 pounds on the roof and the rest of the truck jammed to the headliner – a few times towing a small utility trailer also fully laden.   It’s rated as a half-ton but I exceeded that weight limit many times.

The old Pathy had 208,000 kms on it and, even tho they do 400,000k without much trouble, that is true mostly for their city-dwelling siblings.  The ones that work hard off-road have shorter lifespans.  I figure the old Pathy was and is still good to 250,000kms maybe 275,000 but that puts it into the need-to-have-a-mechanic-nearby mode and there isn’t one out here and I ain’t good enough.  It was time to jump ship.

We bought a 2004 Pathfinder with 160,000 pavement-princess kms on it.  In effect, it is the same car only cleaner.  And I figure it will go the same 250 – 275,000 kms that I expected from the old one.  I will get 100,000 kms.

That’s the part that scares me.

We bought the old Pathy almost 8 years ago.  It had 148,000 kms on it.  It now has 208,000.  I’ll do the math for you.  We put 60,000 kms on the old SUV or about 7500 kms a year.  We drive, on average, under 500 kms a month with maybe four or so longer trips a year to see family or go to the city.  And that frequency of trips south is slowly tapering off. It is extremely unlikely that we will average 600 kms a month or approximately 7500 kms a year but lets think that we will.  I can easily have this car for ten years and, even by then, it will still be going strong.  Most likely.

I’ll be 78.

This car may be my last.

I may have bought a hearse!