The Bubble Car

I was tired of driving the big, box truck around town. Our bank only had a drive thru. The box truck didn’t make the clearance, so I’d have to walk through the drive thru. It was embarrassing. Also, we needed a personal car for tax reasons.

We only had $1,000 available to buy a car. Brock said that if we could find a car that day for under a thousand dollars, we would buy it. After searching for hours and finding the worst cars…cars that didn’t even run for around $3,000, we finally spotted one. The tag on the window said “$995.” However, it was the ugliest car I’d ever seen. It was an ’86 Cheverelet Celebrity. It had been spray painted silver all over. Even the rims were silver. Then, on top of the silver spray paint were little clear balls covering the entire car. The car had been in an art car parade. A third grade class had decorated it.

We bought it for $990 including tax.

On the way home, we almost caused an accident because people were distracted by the looks of the car. That car was definitely a celebrity. It would stop traffic (literally). People would pull over to take pictures of it. Some people even recognized it from seeing it in the parade on television.

We had to do something to not attract so much attention to the car, so we removed each ball individually. That took a while. It didn’t do much good. The silicone used to attach the balls remained on the car causing it to be polka-dotted. We later tried to scrape off the silicone, but to no avail. It was there to stay!

We used that car for a while and it served its purpose. After about a year, we decided to really simplify our lives and move into our truck/RV (more about how we got into our new truck tomorrow) and not live in a house or apartment or anything.

We gave our car to a guy whose car had just died the week before. Brock tried to warn him over the phone that the car was ugly. He asked if it ran okay. Brock told him that it ran great and didn’t have many miles on it for a car its age.

Whenever the guy came to pick it up, he fell over laughing at how ugly it really was. He used it for a couple of years and then gave it to someone else that needed a vehicle.

The rule was that when you were done with it, you had to give it to someone else in need of a car. The bubble car has been passed around to at least 5 people now.
We lived on the road for two years. It was actually quite an adventure (more about some of those adventures in the posts to come).