My beloved Blazer: 1997-2005

Alas, my little Blazer has met its Waterloo. A little over a week ago, and just two months after its safe arrival in country, it was smashed into by one of the Army's civilian employees at an intersection on post and was, gulp, totaled. Fortunately, noone was hurt, but as the little silver Opel (think Ford Escort) was bouncing off of the front end of my Blazer, I noticed that it still had Army-issued temp plates on it, which is generally a sign that you are new to Germany. Or at least new to driving in Germany. So after making sure that neither of us was injured, I inquired as to how long the other driver (a 46 year old Army retiree) had been in country. Two months. Hmm. So, how long had he owned the car? Yeah, 10 days. He paid 800 euro for it...definitely a hoopty. Or it was, anyway, because his car was totaled, too. Oh geez. This happened on Friday evening, the 11th, a little bit after work. The MPs arrived, and there were statements to be taken. Fortunately for me, the other driver was exiting a parking lot when he hit my car as I was driving on a through road. So that's good. The second issue was that I was coming from the right and he was coming from the left, so even if you didn't buy the whole parking lot thing, he failed to yield the right of way, and in Germany, right of way is king. People here won't even look left at intersections. They'll look right and just plow on through. It's amazing: that's how set in stone this traffic rule is. Anyhoo, liability was pretty clear, which made me feel better, however, there were a few tense moments with the MPs, as the 19-year old specialist handling our "case" kept waffling back and forth and going, "Gee, this is a tough one." You could tell it was just killing him to assign blame. Finally, the other driver was like, "Listen, it's right before left." And I think that settled it, but they wouldn't let us have a police report that evening, which made for a few extra worries until I was able to obtain the police blotter the following Tuesday. M., incidentally, was on his way to Darmstadt at the time, and arrived as the accident was being cleaned up. So, I've delayed posting about this, because the accident created some major kinks in our schedule, as anyone who's had an accident can attest to. The good news is, we were able to spend yesterday scrounging the lemon lots and various car exchanges in M.'s neck of the woods, and I may have just found my new ride. I'm planning to head to Wurzburg this afternoon to put a down payment on a car that we found for sale near 1st I.D. Headquarters, so I will likely be joining the ranks of everyone else in country and driving the ubiquitous BMW, if all goes well. But what will I do without all of that cargo space? A car with a trunk? I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to get used to this! I'm definitely mourning the loss of my car a little bit: I'm gonna miss it. The engineer from my insurance company that totalled the car thought I was pretty funny: I made quite a production out of not wanting it to be totaled (yelling "Noooo! Noooo!" and putting my hands over my eyes....trust me, it was hilarious!) but it's okay. The new-to-me car is German-spec which means it goes lots faster, and uses a lot less gas, too. It's a couple of years old, but has remarkably few k's on it...owned by a little old lady who only drove on Sundays, perhaps? Who knows. Cross your fingers for me! Vroom vroom: Molly Murphy, shlagt den autobahn!