If you are what you drive, I'm a Corvette!

After several years of driving a nice little Nissan that was paid for and got great gas mileage, I gave in to the impulse to buy a sexy car. If I tell you I bought a six-year-old Chevy, you'd not be impressed. I bought a 2003 Corvette that is in mint condition, pictured here.

This came after weeks of eyeballing other cars on the road, noting that most cars nowadays are pickup trucks, citified versions of pickup trucks called "SUVs," or generic cars that look like bars of soap with four wheels, designed in a wind tunnel with absolutely no sex appeal at all. Where are the great cars of yesteryear with the fins, the fenders, and distinctive design features that allowed kids like me to identify a car by make, model and year on first glance? (I almost said running boards, but they were way before my time.)

I was attracted to the Saturn Sky and actually visited a Saturn dealer for a closer look, but the Sky has no room for a duffel bag with the top down and barely room for one Scuba tank and nothing else with the top up. Then I drove across the street to a Jeep-Chrysler dealer and saw this beauty with a price I knew was right. The salesman wanted to sell, and gave me a huge trade-in on the old Nissan to make it hard to resist. My resistance collapsed because I knew, if I slept on it overnight, it would be gone.

So, goodbye to the Buick station wagons, four-door family sedans, and fuel-efficient cars with no power in the top end gear that I've been driving. The two cars I most enjoyed were the big old Chevy Impala I bought when I came home from the Army, and a Pontiac Catalina we used to bring the twins home from the hospital. The rest have been sedate cars that a father of four is supposed to drive. I'm now a Chevy man again, and I love it.