It was good to get back into the field today, after having been crippled (almost quite literally) by the lack of a vehicle for over two weeks.
For those who haven’t heard, my old black truck chewed through its second clutch — I actually had the first inkling when returning from Rayne one day, but the old truck did us the favor of dying in the driveway. Our mechanic towed it to his shop and a few days later we learned it was going to cost roughly half what the truck was worth to repair it. ($850 for those who have to know.)
For a while now, Yung has not been happy with the reliability of the truck when I took it out for fieldwork. I thought nothing of it, but she has some sixth sense about certain things (and people) that has for a time now made her unhappy about the truck’s advanced years. It was eleven years old last year, and we’ve owned it for nine. It was a good truck, though I was never crazy about it and it never had enough room in its cab. (I tried a truck box for a while, but I foolishly bought a plastic one which never sealed tight against the rain, and in Louisiana that pretty much makes any kind of box next to useless.)
So, we decided it was time to get a new truck. I briefly thought about trading down to a car, but Yung wanted to keep a truck in the family because we do haul things on a regular basis. And I realized that the kinds of roads I drive on would simply tear the bottom out of most cars, especially the small ones I was looking at.
I had long had my eye on Toyota’s Tacoma line of trucks — and had long wished that that was what we had bought instead of the Isuzu-made-in-Chevy-plant Hombre. So on the freakishly cold weekend after the Isuzu had died, we found ourselves in the Lafayette Toyota dealer’s lot, looking at new Tacomas. (I had spent some time pricing used Tacomas and had discovered that they weren’t any cheaper and sometimes they were more expensive than new — trust me, this didn’t make any sense to me either.) I had imagined that our willingness to spend money would stop at an extended cab version. Yung took one look at how little room there was back there for Lily and said, “Forget it. Let’s just get the double cab.”
And that’s what we did — though I should note that we did not buy from the Lafayette dealer but from Courvelle Toyota up in Opelousas and we could not be happier with how we were treated.
The result is the first vehicle since my 1986 Isuzu Trooper that I think I really love:
