It was the best of rigs, it was... well... the best of rigs.
I bought my Montero about five years ago. It was a blue GenI, a '91. I purchased it after driving my first car, an '84 VW GTI literally into the ground (ripped out the tranny and blew the CVs on a bump that really didn't look that big). The little wabbit just couldn't hold up to all the washboard, potholed, snowed-over, icy, rutted out back roads I bounced it over on my various hiking and backcountry skiing trips. I knew it was time for a real "get you there and back" sort of rig, and one I could fill full of friends, too. I knew I wanted a Montero.
Like I said, it was the best of rigs. It was that car that finally helped me catch the eye of the hot, outdoorsy chick I was wantin' bad at the time. She knew that wherever I was going, if it took a Monty to get there, she wanted to come along.
A year and a half later, the previously mentioned hot chick and I pulled away from our wedding reception in the appropriately decorated Mitsu. It was storybook material.
One more year later, we decided it was time to move across the country: Oregon to Florida. I hate Florida. We both do. But that's where we needed to be for various career-oriented reasons. So, we threw the dog in the back of the Monty, put everything we owned in a U-Haul trailer and towed our lives across this great nation. We had a blast.
But the poor Montero. Grading up and down through the rockies, with every material good we owned dragging along behind, was hard work. And not nearly as much fun as the snow we usually played in together. It didn't complain, didn't let us down once, but it just about took everything the car had to get us there.
Arriving in Orlando, it was a sad site. An entire state completely bereft of the sort of snowy, twisty logging roads the ol' Mitsu and I had built our friendship on. And the rig was tired. And I was living in an apartment and had nowhere to wrench on it. It was time to go.
It was a sad day, but we found a nice mechanic who said he had plans to take real good care of the car. That helped. The Montero left our lives, and my wife and I each got boring little commuter vehicles to pound the pavement with.
Fast-forward one more year. Our time in Florida is now done, and I've taken a job in Merced, California (a day's drive from the Northwest we still call home, and an hour and a half from Yosemite!) We start shopping for cars, and my wife says this: "I want another Montero." Bless her. I'm a lucky man.
All this is to say that, as of today, I am officially a Montero owner once again. I bought a GenII ('93) sight-unseen from 2,800 miles away. Risky, but it's a clean bugger with a rebuilt engine (40k on the rebuilt) and all the maintenance records filed away for my perusal. It'll be waiting for us to come pick it up in two weeks when we arrive in Cali.
Just thought I'd introduce myself, and let you know I'm glad to be part of the community once again. I'm sure I'll have plenty of questions for y'all once I start going through the rig myself, but for now, I'm just happy.
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