I'm not sure how my car got to be the WOTM, because there are so many cooler wagons out there.
The 1994 Roadmaster wagon is the second wagon I’ve had, but it's just the first one I’ve enjoyed. I have driven four-cylinder hatchback cars since the 1980s. Unlike some car sluts I could mention, I'm into long term relationships. Not counting Mrs Danger’s cars, I've owned only six cars in 28 years.
Mrs Danger loves a big V-8. When we first started dating, she drove a 1991 Caprice, gray-green, with the 9C1 police package. It was worn out and ugly. She lived in a bad neighborhood, one block from a crackhouse. When some crackhead pried open her trunk, she just left it bent and didn’t replace the lock cylinder. She kept a big screwdriver in the front seat to open the trunk. When cars on her street got stolen by joy-riders, she tossed a hundred and fifty pounds of old magazines and newspapers in the back seat. Her reasoning was that if joy-riders had to spend ten minutes clearing out the back seat so their buddies to ride in it, they would find another car to steal. Besides, she never had to clean out the trash. When I sold that car, I didn’t keep anything about it. There are no photos left of that car.
Mrs Danger moved in with me, and I decided it was time to get her a nicer car. She was interested in a station wagon, so we looked at them. I discovered that there were two sizes of GM wagons, and the bigger size was much cooler. We bought a high-mileage 1989 Buick Electra Estate Wagon from a guy who drove it to his house on the lake twice a week. The house was 150 miles away. So although the car had over 200k on the clock, it was all interstate mileage. The odometer actually said 40k, and the guy was pretty sure that he'd rolled it over twice.
This picture is from when I put the car up for sale. You can see that the sun has bleached woodgrain completely white on top.
The reason why I had the car for sale. We got married soon after I bought her the Electra Estate Wagon. On the honeymoon, we stopped at Painted Desert National Park in Arizona, on our way to the Grand Canyon.
I get to kiss the bride.
Me on our honeymoon roadtrip. Well, the Olds 307 engine on that car was a dog. It was anemic, only having 140 hp back when it was new, and it was hard to work on. Here's a picture I took of the top of the engine one day when I got frustrated with all the hoses. I was going to replace the seals on the valve covers that day, but there were so many hoses with so many brittle plastic joints that I gave up after doing the driver's side.
Car spaghetti.I kept putting money into that car. I kept taking it to a mechanic. Mrs Danger kept getting stranded. Nick shows inability to learn.
I decided to replace it with an LT1 Buick wagon. It still had a bed long enough for an art show, it had the low center of gravity of a sedan, and it wasn't anemic. It me took about three months of serious searching to find a good car within 500 miles. There just aren't that many wagons in the Mountain Time Zone. Ebay was useless. Some guy in Waterloo New York bought up all the good wagons and shipped them farther away from me. When I discovered the search engines for Craigslist, I started making progress. I found a Buick LT1 wagon with 91k that was only 350 miles away! Yay!
The car had a dent in the quarter panel, and the back window was held up with a shower curtain rod. The seller was a realtor who said that he wanted to fix it up for himself, but he’d run out of money when the Phoenix real estate market collapsed. He said that he had spent two weeks cleaning the interior, because the previous owners had sprayed the whole thing with Pepsi. I believe him. The ash trays had a quarter inch of dried syrup in them. I later found about a gallon of old candy, crayons, and Happy Meal toys under the back seat. But it ran and stopped fine, and the engine sounded good, and it had the tow package. It was
sooo much nicer than the Electra. I bought it. We weren't even home when we found the first problem: we crossing the desert and the gas gauge still read 30% when the car ran out of gas. But it was still nicer than the Electra.
Over the next few months, I learned that the LT1 wagon has a huge aftermarket and lots of online support. Compared to European cars, parts are really cheap. And the car is just plain fun to work on.
This shows how much easier it is to work on the LT1.First I did the basic stuff you have to do with every used car, like flush the antifreeze, replace the brakes and tires, and so forth. Then I fixed the broken things, like the window rollers and the tailgate latch. Then I started in with the small aftermarket stuff, like Tim's EZ bleeder valve. Then I bought more expensive stuff like Gary's cables. Then Airlift helper bags, Bilstein shocks, boxed sway arms, and Navylifer's rear sway bar. By then, I was addicted. When I told Mrs Danger that I wanted to spend $1200 on the exhaust system, she gave that look of wifely understanding and said, "You really want to do it, don't you?"
We’ve driven the wagon to art shows in the region and on vacations around the West. I post pictures from our vacations in
this thread. 
An art show packed in the wagon.
A vacation picture from Grand Tetons.
A snowy wagon picture from a rare snowstorm.The funny thing is that when I started upgrading her wagon, Mrs Danger was not impressed. To her, a car was just a thing that held lots of stuff and went places. She didn't understand why I spent a cold afternoon cleaning spilled paint out of the back carpet when a can of paint froze and burst. But as I continued to make changes, and the improvements accumulated, she started to like it. She liked it
a lot. She hadn't noticed that the car sloshed and wandered, but she sure noticed it when the wandering stopped. She discovered that she liked beating SUVs out of the light and up the onramp. She quit tossing burger wrappers into the back seat. She came out to help me wash the car for the car's sake, instead of just to be helpful. Driving the Roadmaster wagon makes her happy. Back when someone had pried open the trunk of her old car with a crow bar, she didn't really care. But when someone broke out a window with a rock on the wagon last month, she was as upset as I was. The LT1 wagon is the first car she has ever wanted to take good care of. It's pretty cool.
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Thu Dec 01, 2011 12:01 am
