My 2000 Volkswagen Jetta GLS — Commuting Into Adulthood

The Grand Cherokee was perfect for high school. But by the spring of 2006, life was getting more complicated.

My brother decided he wanted to finish his senior year back in Tillamook with my dad. My mom decided she was going to rent out our house in Sisters, buy a fifth wheel, and become a nomad before that was cool. So it looked like I’d be heading back to Tillamook too. All these changes meant the Grand Cherokee would soon go away, and it would be replaced by a different kind of car.

At the same time, my dad — who happened to be superintendent of the Tillamook School District — introduced me to the Network Manager there. They needed someone for the summer to help unbox and deploy new computers at the high school. Was there a little nepotism involved in the introduction? Probably. Did I care? Not even a little. It was my first real IT job outside of Outlawnet, and I was all in.

The catch was that I was still working at Ray’s Food Place in Sisters five days a week, Thursday through Monday. I’d work an early shift at Ray’s on Monday, then drive to Tillamook that evening. Tuesday and Wednesday I’d work about ten hours a day at the district. Then Friday morning I’d drive back to Sisters in time to work the evening shift. About 190 miles each way. Man, that makes me tired just writing it. Ah, to be nineteen again.

That brutal schedule was temporary. The bigger issue was what came next. I had decided to transfer to Portland Community College to continue my CIS degree, which meant commuting from Tillamook to Portland a couple of days a week starting that fall. Highway 6 over the Coast Range, into Hillsboro traffic, and back again — twice a week, every week.

The Jeep didn’t love that math. Fourteen miles per gallon was fine for snow days and lunch runs. It was not ideal for mountain passes and a Portland commute. For part of that summer, my dad loaned me an extra Chevy Cavalier he had sitting around to save fuel. It was a base model, liked to overheat in traffic, and didn’t have functional air conditioning. In Central Oregon. In the summer. It did technically burn less gas than the Jeep, but it wasn’t exactly aspirational transportation. And, if we’re being honest, ya boy likes nice things.

Enter the 2000 Volkswagen Jetta GLS.

Except… the Jetta wasn’t originally the plan.

If you had asked nineteen-year-old me what I wanted, the answer would have been immediate: a Volkswagen Beetle. I had been Beetle-obsessed for as long as I could remember. One of my favorite books growing up was My Bug by Michael Rosen. I loved the Herbie movies. Starting in the mid-90s, my grandma would clip newspaper articles about the New Beetle concept and mail them to me. I had New Beetle T-shirts. I could spot one from half a mile away.

A classic Beetle was never going to happen. When my mom was young, she and her family were in a Beetle that was hit by a drunk driver. Her mom was killed in that crash. Because of that, an air-cooled Beetle was off the table. A New Beetle felt like a way to honor the obsession without reopening old wounds.

So my dad and I went shopping again, and the Beetle was at the top of the list. The first one I drove was a green New Beetle TDI. It was torquey and fun, but I managed to make myself look like I didn’t know how to drive a manual transmission. I knew reverse was in the top left corner. What I didn’t know was that you had to push down on the shifter to engage it. So instead of grabbing first gear, I kept landing in third. The car would shudder and bog, and I insisted to the salesman that I did, in fact, know how to drive a stick. Once he explained the push-down mechanism, I was much smoother.

Still, something about the Beetle didn’t sit right. The “chick car” stigma, fair or not, had already started chipping away at me. The Beetle bugged me a little more than I wanted to admit. (See what I did there?)

Then I drove the Jetta.

It was silver with a black leatherette interior, and it immediately felt more serious. The doors closed with a solid German thunk. The steering felt tighter than both the Jeep and the Beetle. Where the Jeep floated and the Beetle felt playful, the Jetta felt planted. It tracked straight and cornered flatter. It felt like it wanted to eat highway miles.

The interior sealed it. The dash had that soft-touch material that felt upscale compared to anything I had owned before. The switches had weight and resistance. The climate knobs clicked with precision. Even the turn signal stalk felt engineered. At night, the red and blue gauge lighting glowed in a way that made me feel like I was driving something European and important. It even had that distinctive Volkswagen smell — part vinyl, part German plastics.

Around that time, one of my favorite pastimes was reading the Edmunds long-term road tests. I loved the idea of taking a car to the dealer and writing about it like it was part of the ownership story. What I failed to internalize was that the Edmunds cars were brand new and under warranty. Mine was an $8,000 Mk4 Jetta with about 80,000 miles and no safety net.

My dad liked the Jetta too, and that mattered. He’s practical to the core, and if he had serious reservations, I would have heard about them. Instead, he nodded. It made sense. It was efficient. It looked sharp.

Compared to a 180,000-mile Jeep and a 260,000-mile Accord, 80,000 miles felt practically new. Selling the Grand Cherokee private party for $5,200 after buying it for $4,400 didn’t hurt either. For once, I felt like I had executed a clean automotive transaction.

The Jetta went straight into commuter duty. Gas mileage was excellent, but the honeymoon didn’t last long. The driver’s heated seat didn’t work, check engine lights would come and go. Dealer visits in Bend — at a VW/Porsche store, no less — quickly taught me that precision German engineering came with precision labor rates.

One thing I have zero regrets about was upgrading the key. The car came with a plain key, no remote. I ordered the proper Volkswagen switchblade key and had the dealer cut and program it. I loved flipping that thing open; it made the car feel far more expensive than it was.

The Jetta carried me and everything I owned back to Tillamook that summer — clothes, computer gear, cables, books. No furniture, just the essentials. Dakota riding in his crate in the back seat. I was moving back into my childhood home… for about a month. My dad had just sold it. The place I’d grown up in — the driveway I learned to ride a bike in, the garage where we worked on Accords — was about to belong to someone else. We would move into a rental after that until he got married the next year.

By fall, the PCC Rock Creek commute was in full swing. Two days a week, about 75 miles each way over Highway 6. The miles stacked up quickly. The five-speed felt busy at highway speeds, and I started wishing it had the GLX’s sixth gear. Stop-and-go Hillsboro traffic made rowing gears less charming.

By the time winter arrived, the shine was already gone. In heavy rain, the Jetta liked to hydroplane more than I was comfortable with. It handled well in the dry, but in standing water it felt nervous. One afternoon a strong rain and wind storm rolled in while I was at school. Branches were snapping and bouncing off the windshield on the drive home. I made it without incident, but it was draining.

There was also the small matter of my one accident in the car. It happened in the district office parking lot, of all places. I was backing out and misjudged my angle, tapping my dad’s Volvo S60. It scraped my rear bumper but did little more than bend his license plate. I remember trudging into the superintendent’s office with my head held low to confess what I had just done. Not exactly the kind of professional impression a nineteen-year-old tech assistant hopes to make. Fortunately, the damage was minor and my career survived the incident.

Meanwhile, my career was picking up. The district had posted a full-time IT position several times without applicants. When they opened it again that fall, there was one other candidate, but she only had Mac experience. The district was entirely PCs. While I’m a Mac guy at heart, I had proven to my boss, Chas, that I was equally comfortable in a Windows environment. I went through my first professional interview process, which my dad did not participate in. They offered me the job. I had earned my spot.

In December of 2006, at nineteen years old, I started full time as a Desktop Support Specialist for Tillamook School District. I switched to online classes with PCC to make it work. It felt like a real step forward.

The Jetta had done what I asked of it. But it wouldn’t be around much longer.