My first car was a Renault Dauphine, which I loved, but it had approximately the power of an overweight rabbit on a rusty wheel. The second, which theoretically belonged to my dad, but I drove, was a Mercury Comet. Since H had no car (he had totalled his Renault when he fell asleep driving with mono and hit a lamp post at 20mph), we dated in the Comet. We eloped in the Comet. We took the Comet to Ft. Dix, and Ft. Belvoir, and to Firth, where he was stationed just outside Nurnberg. He drove it over cobbled streets, tank trails, the Autobahn, up the Rhine into Holland, to Gouda and Amsterdam, and other cities, and back down into Germany again. We drove it to Berchtesgaden, up to the Eagles' Nest. We brought both kids home from the hospital in the Comet, and had it shipped back stateside with us. What we left behind was the "battalion VW". It was well known if you left a VW beetle on post overnight you were inviting a midnight requisition: a bumper or a fender, or a wheel, someone else needed for their own beetle. We bought the pale green avec rust thing for $50, put a muffler in it and named it Hesper (for wreck of the Hesperus), and I drove it, with baby car seats in the back, all over the hell and gone over Bavarian back roads for two years. One of the battalion officers found the carcass in a junkyard, put enough into it to get it running, and sold it to another battalion officer when he rotated out. That officer put rear-view mirrors on it, drove it until he rotated out and sold it to a Warrant Officer who discovered it had no passenger side floor, and put one in. We sold it to a battalion officer for $75 when we rotated out.
They don't make cars that interesting, anymore.