If you have been following my posts of our year in Italy,
at some point you probably realized that on many of the adventures Angie and I
have shared we were accompanied by a partner; a third party, an enabler who
faithfully played a thankless role in helping provide us the most amazing year
imaginable:
Today we a said goodbye to the Saturn. An Italian salvage yard seems hardly a
suitable ending for so faithful a companion, but the harsh realities of Italian
bureaucracy made it virtually impossible to give the car away. And in the end, it was done in by defective
windshield wipers. The activation switch
inside the steering column had broken, preventing the wipers from turning
on. Getting parts special ordered from
the U.S. would have been very expensive; finding an Italian mechanic willing to
try to fix it, impossible.
It had never been our intention to ship back to the States a 15 year old vehicle with 146,000 miles on it, but we had hoped that we might find some church or someone who needed a car we could donate it to. It didn’t work out that way. It cannot be overstated the role the Saturn played in the life Angie and I made here in Italy. It took us everywhere. It took our family and friends who came to visit us from the U.S., everywhere. It took new friends we made here in Italy, everywhere. We crisscrossed all over Tuscany and northern Italy, including Venice, Lake Como, Cortina and the Cinque Terre. We drove across Switzerland, into France, up the Alsace Wine Route, and we crossed the Italian Alps six times. And in 14,000 miles of driving in Europe the Saturn always started right up, and it always safely brought us home.
It had never been our intention to ship back to the States a 15 year old vehicle with 146,000 miles on it, but we had hoped that we might find some church or someone who needed a car we could donate it to. It didn’t work out that way. It cannot be overstated the role the Saturn played in the life Angie and I made here in Italy. It took us everywhere. It took our family and friends who came to visit us from the U.S., everywhere. It took new friends we made here in Italy, everywhere. We crisscrossed all over Tuscany and northern Italy, including Venice, Lake Como, Cortina and the Cinque Terre. We drove across Switzerland, into France, up the Alsace Wine Route, and we crossed the Italian Alps six times. And in 14,000 miles of driving in Europe the Saturn always started right up, and it always safely brought us home.
I will not miss the Saturn; I will not miss the way it rattled and clattered, nor the way the radio screeched, nor its harsh ride on rough Italian roads, nor the fact that only one window worked.
I will miss everything the Saturn represented.
You three (I'm including the Saturn), packed more adventure into a year than most people do in a lifetime! Sorry to see you leave, but look forward to our paths crossing again.
ReplyDeleteMuch love,
Lisa