I Got Here First

Rated to pull a car on a trailer. Deployed against a mattress topper and a floor lamp.

The trailer was empty by the time I stopped for fuel. I'd hooked up a 5x8 U-Haul on Friday, filled it Saturday morning, driven it to Chapel Hill, assembled a bed and desk with my daughter, and driven back with nothing in it but some moving blankets. On Saturday evening I stopped at a gas station and stood under the canopy longer than the pump required.

My oldest is in an apartment near campus now. My youngest moves into her dorm at the coast in two weeks. After that I'm forty-three years old with no more kids living in my house year-round.

I don't have a good name for what that is. Empty nester sounds like a man with reading glasses and a pontoon boat. I'm not that. Most of the guys I know my age still have a kindergartner. I had kids early, and the math of that is finally arriving all at once, on a Saturday, in a rented trailer.

Nobody I know did this on the same schedule

Here's the part I didn't expect. My friends and the people I drive with are not in this phase and most won't be for a decade.

My group chats are full of single guys or guys with a five-year-old and a soccer schedule. When I text on a Thursday about a Saturday morning drive, they aren't ignoring me. They're at a little league baseball field. Meanwhile the crowd that does have open weekday mornings is twenty-five years older than me and has been quietly running the best drives in the region since before I owned a car worth driving.

That's the real dislocation. Not the quiet house. The fact that the thing you got back, unstructured weekend time, has moved you into a different demographic than your friends, and the calendar you now share belongs to retirees.

I'm going to say the useful part plainly, because I think a lot of people are going to hit this and misdiagnose it as loneliness. Your driving peer group is identified by free time, not by age or taste. When your free time changes, your peer group has to change with it. That's not disloyalty. That's logistics.

The lie about the money

The story everyone tells you is that the empty nest is when you finally buy the car. Kids are gone, expenses drop, go get the thing you've been talking about since 2005.

That is exactly backwards, and I want to be specific about why.

Tuition doesn't start when they graduate. It starts now. Rent on a college-town apartment starts now. A second campus, in my case, starts in two weeks. The money in this life phase is worse than it was six months ago, not better, and it stays worse for four years. Anybody telling you otherwise is describing a phase that arrives at fifty, not forty-three.

So if you're waiting for the empty nest to hand you a budget, you're going to be standing there in an empty driveway wondering where the raise went.

The trailer took maybe half of this tank. The rest is just the price of a vehicle that can pull one.

What it hands you instead is time. And time is the thing that was actually stopping you, which you'd know if you were honest about the last eight years. The car in your garage didn't sit because you couldn't afford tires. It sat because Saturday had a 9 a.m. and a 1 p.m. and a thing at 4, and by the time the house was quiet you didn't want to go put fuel in something.

Audit the fleet before you touch it

Take an honest look at why each vehicle you own is in your driveway.

Mine is easy. My daily driver is a lifted diesel VW Touareg with a hitch and a back seat, and it is in my driveway because for the last 19 years I needed to move people and their possessions and occasionally a car. The old 911 is in my driveway because I couldn't stop working on it. One of those two rationales just expired.

The mistake I see people make here is selling the utility vehicle. Kids gone, no more back seat needed, list the wagon or the SUV and go buy something with two doors.

Don't. The back seat was never why that vehicle earned its spot. The hitch was. A tow vehicle is what turns an old car from a thing you drive within forty miles of your house into a thing you can take to an event three states away and get home from when the clutch cable snaps. The vehicle that hauled a dorm room this month is the same vehicle that makes the fun car usable next month. That's the most useful thing in most enthusiast driveways and almost nobody counts it as part of the hobby.

What actually goes away is the seats requirement. That's a much smaller change than it feels like, and it does not justify liquidating anything.

Don't let the twenty-year-old spend the money

The other problem is buying the car you wanted at twenty.

I've thought about this a lot, because I know exactly what that car is for me and I can feel it pulling. But the person who picked it was choosing for a completely different life. He had infinite unstructured time, no back, no knees, four friends within ten minutes who would come help at eleven at night, and a tolerance for discomfort that was frankly a form of not knowing any better.

I don't have any of those things. I have gray at the temples and a back that files a complaint every time I get out of a low seat. What I do have is real income, actual skills, and a two-car garage, none of which the twenty-year-old had.

So the car for this phase is not his car. It's probably a car he would have found boring. Something you can get into without planning the maneuver, that will do four hundred miles in a day, that you can leave outside a hotel in a strange town without lying awake. The list of cars that clear that bar is long, cheap, and mostly not on anyone's poster.

Give yourself a rule: no purchase for ninety days. Not because buying is wrong. Because you have no idea yet what your Saturdays look like, and you're about to spend real money on a guess the twenty-two-year-old made for you.

What I'm actually doing

Nothing, for now. That's the plan and I'm saying it out loud so it's harder to weasel out of.

Not buying is not the same as not looking. I have a saved search for Mk5 R32s. I have also read more about the BMW i3 than any adult needs to. Those two cars do not answer the same question. One is a VR6 I've wanted since I was reading about it on a forum in a different decade. The other is a weird little electric hatchback that would make every trip across Charlotte cost about a dollar. I can't tell you which one I want, and that's the entire reason I'm not buying either one yet.

So for ninety days I will drive what I have, on the mornings I now have. I want to find out whether I actually want to be able to tow the 911 on a trailer for four hours or have more fun on my daily commute. Whether I want to go alone. Whether the thing I've been missing is the car or the people around it, because I suspect for a lot of us in this stage of life it's the people and we keep trying to solve it with a purchase.

The Touareg stays (for now).