52 out of 52 people found this review helpful.
Our 1993 Dodge Grand Caravan has 140,000 miles and still going strong!
Date of Review: Jul 10, 2005
The Bottom Line: I am glad we bought Bertha!
The Pantazis Family needs a new car! That we know. It is not a surprise to anyone. The three children are now ages 13, 10 and 6. But as we are wandering the car lots looking for the perfect vehicle, we are still fondly driving Bertha. Bertha is our 1993 Dark Green Dodge Grand Caravan. Bertha has a six cylinder engine. She has been pretty good on gas, as gas mileage goes, getting about 20 to 25 miles per gallon. She stalls sometimes, usually if we let the gas tank get to the point where the light goes on to indicate we need fuel, she will stall. While some cars still have gas when the light goes on, Bertha seems to need to have gas immediately. We try not to let her ever get that low.
Bertha needed cleaning out so that we could pass her in for the new car we are planning. So the whole family went to work. As we cleaned her we thought about the 9 years that she has been taking us to our destinations.
Bertha was bought by us as a used car back in 1996. We paid 13,000 dollars for her then, a used car at three years old. She had originally been purchased by a young couple, and they had traded her back in because her payments for them were just too high. She had 23,000 miles on her when we bought her. She was a shiny glimmery beauty then. Her seats were clean, she had double car seats built in in the middle back seat. My middle child was my baby then. He was two years old. I could easily but him into the car seat, and tuck my daughter into the seat beside him with her own booster seat. The built in car seat is really a booster seat though, and I folded it up and used my own carriers for my younger babies. My son always slept in the car, and these built in seats were not meant for babies to sleep in. However, Bertha was my Godsend. Bertha held everything I wanted to carry from groceries to kid paraphenalia to furniture to boxes. Bertha took us camping, and on road trips. In 1999 her air conditioner went and we never have fixed it. It would have cost over a thousand we were told. Since we expected to have to purchase a new car anyway we decided to just keep Bertha for road trips in the area. So Bertha became our second car. She has driven children to and from first grade, second grade, third grade and now seventh grade! Bertha has been a true friend and amazing car for our family. She has driven us to sporting events, and on long car trips to Maine and Maryland. She has had ice cream spilled on her seats, McDonald's drinks spilled in her cup holders, and her seats have been thrown up on and still she is easy to clean up and continues taking us to our destinations.
Our children grow quickly, amazingly quickly. Bertha still carries all of the memories of my children and our car trips. My sons names are written in crayon on the back seat, the stain on the floor is the red paint that my boy spilled on his way to Cub Scouts. There are remnants of old dried flowers from the girl scouts meeting when I taught the girls to make flower arrangements.
Bertha has seatbelts for seven people. These seatbelts have held girl scouts, boy scouts, soccer teams and baseball teams. They have carried theater children to and from car wash fundraisers and the seats have been filled with Girl Scout cookies. Stashed under the seat we found a pair of crutches laying on the floor. We remembered my broken foot three years ago and how Bertha had been the only available car to get me to the hospital.
Under the back seat I found my daughter's first pair of soccer cleats. I recalled the night at soccer when my little daughter spent more time chasing fireflies than the soccer ball. We laughed about that night. My daughter giggled and thought about how much she hated playing soccer. And surprisingly enough I found a bag of clothing that was meant to be turned in to the Salvation Army and never got there. Inside was my son's first swim suit. He remembered back to the time he had swam the mile at the YMCA and on the way home he had been shivering and Bertha heat up so quickly to keep him warm.
Bertha has been to the garage a few times. Very few times. She had had many maintenence issues, like all cars do. She once had a flat tire. None of us will forget the day that the tire blew. I was driving, my children were all sitting in their seats and each of them were holding baby bunnies! The tire went flat and we moved to the side of the road. We still laugh about the look on the policeman's face when he pulled over next to us and saw me and my three children and our three baby bunnies.
Bertha has been a wonderful car. She has been very easy to drive and perfect for our family. Her sliding side door has always been a little bit hard to slide, but this has been good for my children's arm strength!
Bertha has been broken into and someone attempted to steal her once. When she was broken into the person got into her through the back sliding door. The thief got away with my little sons fundraiser money that had been stashed in the drawer under the front seat.
Bertha was almost stolen from my driveway one night. My children and I went out to the car in the morning, and when I got into the driver's seat, I started to put the key in the ignition and noticed that the ignition was on the floor. Someone had used a screw driver to attempt to hot wire poor Bertha. But she had not allowed them to finish the job! I was told that cars like Bertha tend to be a hot item with car thieves.
Her key has broken in the lock three times. We have replaced the keys through the dealership each of the three times. The last time cost us $15.00 and we were told that these keys were hard to get now.
We cleaned out the front console of Bertha, her ashtray was filled with pennies, and while I was cleaning her out, my youngest child became perplexed with the cigarette lighter. Our newer car does not have one of these, and my son wanted to know what it was. He became very upset at the thought that Bertha might have smoked or been smoked in when he did nto know about it!
I found the cassettes I had always played in the cassette deck to sooth my tired babies at the end of long days. I put one of these in while we cleaned our beloved car, and my children all became very quiet.
I found a bill in the glove compartment from Portland Glass and remembered the day that we had gone out to Bertha and when I closed my front door her back window had smashed to smitherines and lay all over the driveway. The repair people that came to my driveway to fix it told me this was a phenomenon that happened with caravans.
My daughter sighed as she reached into the pockets on the back of the front seats and found an old naked Barbie doll. She took that Barbie into her room and dressed her. My son squealed with joy when he opened the compartment next to his back seat and found a Game Boy Game he had been missing. Bertha has been the hiding place for Christmas presents. In the back I found remnants of some wrapping paper and recalled the time I had stored three brand new bikes in her compartment. The passenger seat of Bertha is decorated with lovely rainbow colors. Remnants of the Skittles my son spilled from the Easter Egg Hunt four years ago. He had carried his eggs so proudly after finding them and then cried when he spilled out the contents of them all over the car.
The back seat of Bertha has been folded, pulled out and put back in after carrying numerous large items. The seat is still easy to use and never a problem to re install. The seat was pulled out to fill the space with bales of hay for our baby bunnies. It has been filled with goat food for my friend's farm. Bertha has truly been around!
We washed the outside of Bertha, and noticed the place where the paint was washed away where Bertha had been egged on Halloween a few years ago. It had taken a lot of scrubbing to get the eggs off. It was such a nasty job to clean! Her body is in good shape, a few dents here and there probably from the super market. One side of her has a line where someone had scraped her with a key. There is a bit of rust on the sliding door, but at her age, this is expected. Some of the rubber from her various grooves is pulling away. But all in all, for all that Bertha has been through, she looks pretty good to us.
Bertha has been a good car for us. She will continue to drive us here and there until the new car is purchased. She is going to be difficult to replace!
