Midlife Crisis Volvo Journey Travelogue - Entry 1

Things have happened in my life that have caused me to just not feel myself.

In times of crisis, I guess the brain reverts to buried neural pathways that seem lost, but are actually just dormant. I found myself browsing the internet for deals on used cars, something I hadn't done in years (or at least, that's what it feels like to me; maybe I'm just kidding myself).

I eventually stumbled upon a listing for a 2006 Volvo XC70 with about 119,000 miles on the clock. Blue on beige interior, which instantly caught my eye, and it was a one-owner vehicle that had lived its whole life in California, for under $6,000 before taxes and fees. AND trimmed in beautiful fake tortoiseshell. In my early 20s, I had a 2007 XC70, black on black, and it was the first vehicle I'd ever purchased with my own money. I loved that thing, even though right after I brought it home I immediately needed to replace the front suspension because those were shot to bits.

After turning it over in my head a little bit, I pulled the trigger and made the trip out to California to take a look at it and hopefully drive home with it. As it turned out, it was also the weekend after my friend's birthday, so I was able to be in town to celebrate it with him, but I'm getting a little ahead of myself here, so I'm going to rewind just a little.

The car was out in Fontana, and my friend lives in Los Angeles. He very generously offered to drive me out there even he had to drive through and hour and a half in traffic and stick around however long it took me to buy the car just in case the deal fell through. One other little piece of context that I need to add here is that this friend does a puzzle every year for his birthday and has us participate/play in it, and this year he was designing, from scratch, a murder-mystery game. He was fretting about being able to complete it on time because the party was going to be in just two days, and he hadn't finished designing the game yet, but even so, he was willing to take this time out of his day to make this stupid mission of mine a little easier to do.

Getting the Car

The car was in pretty decent shape when I went to go look at it. It kind of felt like seeing an old friend because I know this vintage of Volvo pretty well at this point, and there's something about these P2 station wagons that make them the most handsome generation of Volvo to me. The only real ding I had against it was that it only came with one keyfob, and that one was literally falling apart. In order to turn the car on without it disintegrating in my hands, I had to hold it very carefully and twist with a particular firmness. That was definitely going to need replacing as well as a new key, and since these are the annoying new-fangled keys with chips in them, they can actually cost a pretty penny to replace unless you're willing to spend time on the phone with a dozen different locksmiths trying to find someone who knows how to program these keys and isn't charging you ridiculous gobs of cash for it. I was able to get about $200 knocked off the price for that, and everything else went pretty smoothly.

I think the fun really started on the way home. While my friend was waiting for me to close the deal, he went to the Fontana Public Library, which is located on a really nice campus where the city of Fontana appears to have concentrated a lot of its public services and facilities (kind of how like Austin City Hall, the Commissioner's Court, and the Central Public Library branch are all just kind of next to each other downtown). The library was having a sale of all kinds of stuff: books, CDs, DVDs, etc with a bunch of BOGO deals. My friend and I went kind of nuts and I ended up walking out of there with a bunch of CDs (the Volvo has a CD player!) and a bunch of DVDs. Some select items:

The way home also took us past Monterey Park, and we stopped by there at a place called Mongolian Homemade Pies and had an amazing dinner there. I originally suggested we stop by because I remember the dim sum in Monterey Park being great and wanted to have some again, but then this pie place popped out to us on Google Maps and so we went for that instead. The eponymous pies were little pockets of dough, of a similar consistency to 파전 (pajeon) if you've ever had it at a Korean restaurant, filled with spiced ground lamb and beef. You could get a plate of those, and then wash it down with complimentary bowls of lamb soup they had in a big pot sitting next to a toppings bar.

Anyways, that's about it for this part. I didn't really take a lot of photos this day, but I can at least share a photo of the Volvo.

da Volvo

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