Me: Can you believe the Eagle is all gone?
Him: (in an incredulous tone) Yeah... somebody wanted it!
Yes, it's true. It finally happened. All that's left of the Eagle is this:
A license plate and a sold notice are my souvenirs from a year of wrenching, pushing, pounding, and otherwise forcing the Eagle back onto the road as a viable daily driver. It got to the point where I had done all I could for and with the Eagle, and it began to feel an insistent pull toward new horizons. So, it's busted outta this joint. Skipped town. Peaced out. Now it belongs to a kid about an hour south of here, for whom the Eagle will be one heck of a first car.
The garage will be a little emptier now, since the car I've replaced the Eagle with is only 2/3 its size at most. Some of the tools might gather a little more dust, and the garage floor might gather a little less transmission fluid.
In an odd twist of fate, our 4-wheel drive friend had one last hurrah yesterday before moseying on down an empty desert highway. We in the Valley of the Sun got most of a year's worth of rain in the wee hours of Monday morning. Never in this town's history has more rain fallen in Phoenix in a single day. You can read about it and see some pictures here. Those flooded streets look pretty intimidating, but then again, AMC Eagles rush in where subcompacts fear to tread. A major intersection covered in a foot of standing water? Easy. Residential streets with water all the way up to people's garage doors? Bring it on. It's hard to beat splashing through a temporary curb-to-curb lake while all the other cars sit paralyzed at the water's edge.
It was a great last day for us, and with that, the saga ends. The Eagle has landed, and now, the Eagle has flown.
