In the midst of so many other big things, we bought a car! While I never would have thought we’d be a two-car family in Thailand, there are many things about my life I never would have thought.
While our Toyota SUV is perfect for the community–large enough to fit in lots of people, closed in the back to keep everyone safer, old enough to handle blood and vomit and fish stink, tough enough to carry 500 kilos of rice…It’s perfect in so many ways. However, to make long trips out of Mae Sot, it needed some significant repairs. And pouring huge amounts of money in an older, fish-smelling car felt a little unwise.
But as Covid pushed up the cost of in-country flights and we are limited to staying in Thailand for the foreseeable future: we were starting to feel trapped. After renting a car for a trip a few weeks ago, we began to consider what a family car might look like for us. In the end, we decided that we couldn’t really afford to buy a new community-useful car, but we could afford a family-useful car while keeping this community car running.
Enter a new-to-us 2004 Honda Civic that we now use for our family of three!
And with that, we couldn’t really find a need to have a community car, a family car, AND a motorbike. And since we very, very rarely find us going anywhere without a child or community members; even more rarely without large amounts of rice or flour.
We said goodbye to our motorbike of ten years.
And we were sadder about it than we expected!
{Oak helped our sadness by deciding the very day we drove it to the new owners to wear his superhero cape and mask everywhere we went. 🥰}
It really does feel like the end of an era. We bought this motorbike new when we moved and drove every one of its 34,650 kilometers right here in Mae Sot. 😳
We bought community Christmas presents on it for a few years.
We took instruments to home church on it more times than I could count.
We carried 25 kilogram bags of flour on it, in additional to all our groceries for years.
We took visitors for fun rides around the city.
We drove it as a family of three.
And he can really rock a helmet more than most.
Years ago when we bought it, it was the best way to experience a new city. We smelled all the smells, so that we still to refer to “the cotton candy corner.” We felt all the heat and rain and wind right on us everywhere we went, learning to sit in the shade during stoplights.
It represents so much of making life here in Mae Sot our home: conquering fears, adjusting, becoming us–here, in this context.
And while it’s the end of an era, I kind of hope we can go back to it some day…whether that’s teaching our kids to drive one if we’re still living in Asia (!) or if that’s making our lives in America work with one car and a moto.
I really have no idea.
I’m just kind sad to see it go! But I’m also realizing this is just another version of the mom haircut. It was inevitable as we grow beyond twenty-somethings moving to a faraway country and making it up as they go.
Now we’re thirty-somethings raising a family in a faraway country and making it up as we go.
Somehow that’s a little bit different and has us saying goodbye to our motorbike.
It’s been real, it’s been fun. It’s been really, really fun.
