I absolutely did NOT want this car! There was no way that I wanted to be "Lada King" of the neighborhood!

Luckily enough, we had made it through the first winter with our shiny red Samara. With the coming of the warm weather, we started riding the bike and only used the car for groceries and on other rare occasions. Now, the summer was fading away and the time was coming to put the motorcycle away. I was preparing Bob for the winter with the hope that we would make it through a second one and get our money's worth out of the two cars that we had already bought.

Standing in our driveway dressed in my greasy clothes, I was accompanied by our two Russian cars with most of their doors wide open. Bob was getting another organ transplant from his half-brother Spot and I was feeling like Doctor Frankenstein again, breathing new life into the half-dead. This is a scene that has been played out hundreds of times in front of my house since I bought the Ladas. Never before have I owned a car that has been so frail or that I've bothered to put so much energy into. I didn't want to feel like I'd made a bad purchase so I made all the effort I could to keep it running. "One more winter", I kept telling myself and Yvette; this would validate the purchase and I'd be glad to get rid of the whole mess and find something more reliable.

So, here I was feeling surly about some nasty wiring or unreachable bolt, when I see two men walking across the street towards me from a sleek American mini-van. Both men are casually dressed, blue jeans, light jackets, running shoes. One man is in his thirties, his black hair is medium length, parted on one side and combed across his forehead. He looks like a mortgage officer freshly showered after a game of tennis. The other man is in his sixties, a little stubbly on this Saturday morning, serious, quiet.

As the two men step on to my driveway and approach me, the younger one says, "I noticed that you have Ladas. I have one too! My father loves Ladas."

This was a heart-warming moment for me! Finally, I had met some other people sharing the same experience as me. Finally, I would have someone to share stories with and beg-borrow-trade-give parts with. An ally. A second person in the smallest self-help group on the planet. A comrade. Here was a stranger extending his hand out to me so that we could help each other with the most ornery cars running daily in Montreal. Misery loves company.

"Know anybody who wants to buy one?", he says to me.

Kaboom! Goodbye heart... hello loneliness.

It turned out that Nathan earns his living buying and selling cars. He lives around the corner from my place and had spotted my cars on his back and forth past my place. I guess that he had been waiting to see me outside so that he could introduce himself.

"This is my father Jonah. He convinced me to buy the Lada when we were in Ontario last month. He has great memories of them from back home. How much are they worth these days?"

Nathan's father reminded me of my uncle Gerry. With a deep, serious gaze, you know right away that a man like this will only offer you helpful advice and the most significant information. Nathan's dad said to me as we shook hands "This car that we bought is solid like a rock. No rust at all."

The first thing I remember saying after the initial introductory formalities was "I don't want to be the Lada king of the neighborhood!" And I meant it too. We had grown to like our car but it wasn't fit for anything more than driving around the city and it was taking a lot of my energy to keep it running. Both Yvette and I were looking forward to the day when we would own something more reliable that would allow us to visit places further from home than the CAA's maximum towing distance.

Nathan didn't look too thrilled when I told him it would take him four months to sell the car and that he would only get three hundred dollars for it. He couldn't understand how a running car could be worth so little. This was a deja-vu moment for me after meeting Jason the previous autumn. Nathan said, "I paid more than that for it." I was feeling bad for him. "What about you, why don't you buy it? Look, yours has all these rusty parts, the one I have is in much better condition. You'd have a better car if you bought mine." I told him again that I didn't want to have Ladas for the rest of my life. Nathan then gave me his business card and invited me to come over and look if I felt up to it. I told him that I would bring him the internet address for the SamaraLovers Yahoo Group and we all said goodbye to each other.

As he left my place, Nathan had said that he was going to put the car up at the local auction and take his losses on it. He asked me a couple of technical questions to satisy his curiosity about a car that was a mystery to him. He wondered if it was normal that it 'burped' in first gear. He asked how come there were no newer ones around. I told him as much as I knew.

After Nathan and his dad left and I settled down to my task again, I began thinking clearly. It occurred to me that if his car was really more solid than mine... and that if he was going to sell it for whatever amount he could get, then maybe it would be a better parts car for me than the run-down and very picked-over Spottie. I realized that I could have a new stash of parts for three hundred dollars minus whatever the junkyard would give me for taking Spottie away for scrap metal. I asked Yvette to come out and I told her what had just happened. Thank God I have such a wonderful wife; she told me that if I thought it was a smart move, then I should go ahead and consider it.

I thought about it for a couple of hours as I finished fixing up Bob. It made sense; I had used a lot of the basic things from the parts car already and a fresh supply would make getting through the winter less perilous. After I finished cleaning up, we walked over to Nathan's area and started looking for the car. I was pretty sure I knew where Nathan lived because it was a house that we had visited when we were house shopping two years before. When we got there, I saw a few cars in his drive like he told me but there was no Samara. We walked around the block a couple of times in case I was mistaken, but we never found the Samara. This was a big let-down moment. Maybe the whole thing was too good to be true? Maybe it was all a big joke? I mean, how often does an unknown neighbor show up at your door and offer you a cheap car?

I called Nathan and he explained to me that the Samara was in his garage. I haven't figured out why this one car was getting the best treatment but I like to think it's because Nathan knew it was a special car. It didn't take me long to realize that once I saw it. It was exactly as they had told me, sort of.

Jane is a beautiful medium dark grey 1994 3 door Samara. She has this amazing metal-flake aquamarine pinstripe running down her side. Like every Samara that I've ever come across, she wasn't running at her best. There's something about her carburetor that causes a terrible jerk in first gear, right at the moment when it seems that she's going to reach her stride. Her exhaust pipes were leaking noise, there are a couple of dents in the body, one of the ball joints was all rusted up so every time we went around a corner, the steering would get real stiff and there were crunk-crunk-crunk sound effects.

But... she's in very, very good condition otherwise. There's a little rust on the rear shock towers but I haven't found any anywhere else on her. The engine is spotless. I have no idea how the previous owner kept that engine so clean. It isn't shiny new metal under the hood, but it is clean. There's no cruddy greasy buildup on the motor, or anywhere else either.

I realized that Jane was not going to be a parts car. I wasn't very sure what we were going to do with a "Summer" car, but I knew that we were looking at one. Somewhere along the line, Nathan explained to us that his Samara had spent the last twelve months parked in a garage because it had been repossessed from it's owner by the bank. The bank had eventually sold it off and that's how Nathan came to own it. I was already thinking that it was going to spend the next six months parked in my mother's empty garage.

I had realized that an Ontario car coming to Quebec would need to go for government inspection before it could be registered and driven. It costs 75$ to get a car inspected in Montreal. I also figured that there would be some work and running around involved in fixing up the car because there's no way the inspector would find the car perfect. It occurred to me that Nathan would have better resources for taking care of all this so when I made my offer to him, I made sure that I let him know. After some thought, Nathan decided that he'd lose too much time and money if the car failed the inspection. He thought about the 50$ alternator that he'd already had to buy and install and he decided to cut his losses at this point; he offered to sell me the car that I didn't want at a price he couldn't believe. We shook hands on the deal. I said, "I can't believe that I bought a car today." Nathan said, "I can't believe that I gave a car away today." I was suddenly, and very unexpectedly, the owner of three Ladas.

A few days later, Jane was stashed away in my mother's garage. Luckily for me, my uncle George had spent a couple of weeks making space in there so that he could winter his mini-van and unfortunately for him, he'd run about six inches short on his calculations. I sure felt lucky that my new car was about two feet shorter than his van! I don't think that my mother's garage had ever been empty enough to hold a car before. My luck was running a good streak.

By the Spring of 2004, my winter car was getting very ragged. I was running on only two brakes because one of the rear cylinders had popped open. I couldn't defrost the windshield any more because the heater controls had broken and were stuck in some useless positions. The nice Ferrari-red Tremclad paint job was blistering off of the hood, roof and doors. If the winter had been one week longer, I might not have made it through with Bob.

Even though she wasn't running great, I was very, very glad to bring Jane out of the garage. The very first thing that I remember doing was taking Bob's carburetor out and swapping them. Now, Jane ran nicely and Bob had the hiccups. I knew then that the grey Samara's engine would run as nice as it looked.

After that, I spent every evening and weekend for the next two months fixing up the new Samara. What I didn't spend in cash to buy the car, I spent in sweat and time getting it running right. I took the exhaust system off of Spottie and put it on Jane. I replaced both rear brake cylinders and metal lines because they were about to explode. A year, to the day, after I'd had to emergency repair one of Bob's front calipers, I did the same to Jane. I replaced three ball joints before I found out which one was seized up. Knowing that I was going to have the front-end aligned, I replaced both steering rods with a set that I painted dark blue. Then, I had the front end professionally aligned. For the very first time in my life, I changed the motor oil in one of my cars (and I've had a dozen over the last twelve years)! I was starting to get affectionate about my little grey car.

The more that I fixed it and drove it, the more confident I became that we could use it for long-distance travel. It ran great: most of the systems had been checked and overhauled, it had good tires and four speakers! It was like a motorcycle with walls! Very comfy... dry, warm, no bugs... what freedom this gave us! Yahoo!... it'd been a while since we could get away like this. I got excited and asked Yvette to join me on a 1500km round-trip to the Gaspé. My bestest friend lives out there and I hadn't visited him for a while.

Getting ready to go, we had all sorts of stuff packed in the trunk... tools, lights, work-clothes, spare parts, food, water... the usual paranoid stuff and then some because it IS a Lada. We were both hesitant, Yvette and I. We both wanted a safe trip and had lived through breakdowns before. I don't know what we would have done if we had run into big trouble on this trip. Luckily, we didn't. We had an amazing road-trip and it made my love for these cars grow humongously.

Building on our good memories, we made two more 1500km road trips with our grey Jane that summer... we visited the Warren's farm near Buffalo, NY for the LOCC U.S. Invasion weekend at the end of July and then we trekked out to Niagara-on-the-Lake in September. Two more amazing getaways. This is the kind of achievement that cements attachments; now, there's no way that I'm ever going to let go of these little cars. Now...

I absolutely LOVE this car!

So, now you finally know why. It took three chapters to explain it but this is the reason: these little cars have given us our freedom back. After we stopped motorcycling regularly, we were getting land-locked. Now that we have cars that we can take places, we can get back out and see the world. And, although I hate to say it, these little cars are so much better than the bikes for long distance: we don't ache, we don't get wet, we don't have to put on and take off clothes as the sun comes and goes, we can enjoy music, we can talk to each other, we can read plays. This is amazing! It took me a long time to come around, but I finally like cars. And since I enjoy tinkering, these simple machines are perfect for me.

As a side note, in July we bought a white Niva and sent pictures of the whole collection around. Yvette's cousin, from back home Cape Breton said to her, "You know, it looks like the bootlegger's house with all those cheap cars in the driveway." Ha-haaa... isn't that hilarious?!? I love it! Lucky for us, all of the neighbors are friendly and no one minds my eccentricity. In fact, it was my neighbor Nathan who spurred me on with this beautiful grey car; our third. Thanks Nathan!

So, now that we have a wonderful car that runs well, maybe we're thinking of making it a little prettier? If only I could walk over to Canadian Tire and get a nice set of alloy wheels... hey, wait a minute, what's that parked across the street from my office?...

(to be continued)