In a world that was quickly plunging into chaos having a constant companion can help keep your sanity. For many people, especially readers of Curbside Classic, a vehicle can be that constant companion, as my V70 was for me. Isolation, fear and long hours at a new job were constantly wearing me down, but the comfort and confidence the V70 offered me was a safety net I didn’t realize I needed.
Just before COVID hit, I landed a new job with my fancy new degree. I was hired to work in psychiatric emergency services, providing community based crisis evaluations for people in difficult and overwhelming situations. This would find me going to people’s homes, hospitals and other community based settings and, if necessary, emergency certifying them to a hospital for their safety. I also started working with a local police department in the same role per diem, going out with officers who had requested mental health support. All of this was new and interesting, but even in the best of times it is an emotionally draining job. Add in the global pandemic and the terrible toll it took on mental health, it was even more difficult.
My V70 ferried me from my temporary home in Connecticut back to Rhode Island daily, blasting along I-95 in morning rush hour traffic. It would also carry me to calls all over the southern counties of the state for crisis calls. I loved settling into the leather seats (still the most comfortable seats I’ve ever had the pleasure of sitting in), dropping it into first gear and hitting the throttle. The rush of the turbo helped erase the stress, and for a short time (or longer as I was driving to and from New Haven), the mess of the world seemed to fade away.
In May of 2020 we located an apartment in Rhode Island, and packed up everything we both owned and moved. While the bulk of things were shifted in a U-Haul Econoline (even to this day I steadfastly refuse to call them the E-Series, they are and always have been Econolines) the V70 took a few trips with U-Haul trailers behind it. I never shied away from towing with it, and it never let me down.
As COVID progressed and people settled into working from home, I was still had to go into my job every day. Part of. my job entailed completing psychiatric evaluations in a hospital emergency departments…in the same physical space that COVID patients were being treated. To say it was rough is an understatement. Given my proximity to people COVID patients, I didn’t feel comfortable visiting my older parents or my young son. My experience with COVID was much different than others, given the isolation yet still having to work at my office.
Cars were something that kept me going. The V70 performed as good as ever, and I added something else to the fleet, my first Jeep. There were many exciting adventures to be had with the Jeep, but the V70 was a constant. While the Jeep was the new “adventure” vehicle, the Volvo kept racking up miles.
Work and back was a round trip of 70 miles each day. Needless to say, there were a lot of repairs that came and went. My V70 seemed to eat tie-rods both inner and outer. By my guess I replaced one or both sides at least four times, one in a Walmart parking lot in Upstate NY on the way back from my parents’ house.
For a brief time during the summer of COVID, M and I got into boating. As a kid I sailed a Sunfish on Keuka Lake, and my dad sourced me another small sailboat many years before. In what would be one of only two times in 2020 that I would see my parents (the other was Christmas of that year in a rest area on I-84, 10 feet apart), we went to my parents’ for a visit. At the conclusion of our visit, we hauled it back to RI and went sailing at local yacht club a few times…it was a place close by that we could go to be outdoors when everything was shut down. We also went canoeing quite a bit. The V70 served as a good tender for the various hulls in our fleet.
In November of 2020 I finally was able to realize a dream – I was one of three friends who rented a rather large shop space. It was nice to have inside storage for some of my cars as well as a spot to work on them. Topping it off, I was able to secure, along with another friend who sub-let space, a two-post car lift. Of course, Pete was tasked with hauling the lift home on a U-Haul trailer. I was finally able to actually work on cars properly for the first time in my adult life, and it was glorious.
The glory of the garage lasted only so long, however. In Spring of 2021, the leader of my car-group cohort got into an extremely nasty fight with me over things I still don’t understand. We parted ways, and in a move that still hurts to this day, most of the friends in the group also drifted away. Shortly after this, the garage space became untenable due to ongoing friction, and I had to vacate. The friend I was sub-letting space to decided she wanted her own space, so we went into a smaller shop together, along with the two-post lift. The sting of losing those friends haunted me for a long time, and I spent a great deal of time examining myself and my own misdeeds. I have come to understand that both things can be true, and both parties involved in a friendship can wrong the other and neither can be right. Life lessons are sometimes the hardest to learn.
There weren’t many long-distance trips left for Pete at this point, but in early Winter of 2020, my stalwart friend from Vermont had a mission to go to Halifax, NS to pick up a Honda N-One. The details of why we were doing this are best left unspoken, but we headed off to cross into another country, COVID be damned. After a long journey to what felt like the other end of the world, we made it to Halifax. I’ve always wanted to go there, but this would not be the trip that I thought it would be. C got into a fight with Canadian customs, almost requiring me to bail him out. One heated conversation with an Irishman on another continent later, and we departed Halifax without the N-One. It was still a good trip (although I messed up my mail-in COVID test and haven’t been back to Canada since, I wonder if they’ll let me in?) The highlight of the trip for me was driving back with C playing with his VIDA that was plugged into the OBD…while in motion. The amount of things that can be adjusted and changed by a factory connection is simply staggering.
The V70 made a return trip to Carlisle for the big Import show in the Spring of 2022, complete with the roof-top tent that I had purchased previously for the Jeep. It wasn’t an ideal fit, as it had to be positioned too far forward to allow the tailgate to open. Needless to say I was comfy and had a nice place to take a nap on the show field.
I was also to obtain the services of a bunch of Volvo geeks to help me figure out what was wrong with the starter, resolving a long standing issue that plagued me for the better part of half a year. It escapes me now, but something was wrong with the starter and it worked when it wanted to, and finally then not at all. I didn’t have the time to sort it out, so I became very adept at parking facing downward on slopes so I could give Pete a little shove and pop-start it.
Such is the life with an old car, right? My father and I finally replaced the starter, but that still didn’t solve the issue. It wasn’t until C dug into it that he found out we hadn’t connected all the wires correctly. Just like that, Pete was a self-starter again.
By late 2022, Pete was starting to really show his age. M and I had purchased a house, and he helped with the move, but he was leaking everything except windshield washer fluid, had a vacuum leak that I couldn’t source and rust was starting to bloom on the driver side rear arch.
Sadly, at 348k miles it was time to park my trusty V70. Pete still sits forlornly outside my shop near the entrance door where I see him every time I enter. I have visions of pulling what I can from him (doors, engine, transmission, etc.) for another silver ’01 V70 so that he may live on, but time and money are as always the most difficult resources to come by, especially with the added resource drain of home ownership.
For a $700 car, Speedy Pete is in the running for my all-time favorite car that I have ever owned. With 217k on the clock when I picked him up, I doubt anyone, including the Belgian family that owned him previously, would have expected him to add another 130k. I know I sure didn’t.
Related CC reading:
Classic CARmentary: 2001 Volvo V70 T5
Not for the first time, in my head I rather foolishly read “348k” as kms (we use them here, you see). That’d be a fine figure for any car, but no. We’re talking 560,000kms. Damn, but that Volvo has LIVED, and in a hardarse cold and salty environment for much of that. I’d not merely want but demand V70 seats to do even 117 miles – or 188k kms! – of that total.
I’m familiar with the job you do (or were doing), though hasten to add I haven’t done it nor am qualified to. To me, it’s at the hardest, most grinding end of professional employment: at very least, cushy, it sure ain’t. All power to you for doing it. I don’t doubt there were easier choices for the type of qualification you must have newly had.
Still shaking my head at that mileage. Or kilometerage, if that’s a word (which, natch, it now is by virtue of having said it).
Thank you, I love my job and find it immensely rewarding and sometimes even entertaining, but never EVER dull.
There was a ’01 V70 at the NEC Show in Birmingham a few years ago that was used as a hotel shuttle and I believe that it had 1,000,000 + miles on it, and it looked immaculate, unlike my V70.
I almost had a line on another one (’01, T5 five speed, but in black with 115,000 miles on it) but I lost out. I really, really want to get back into one.
That Volvo is almost better than a dog. Rather than being parked for good, it’s now on sentry duty. Good stories, great car.
I feel like I should turn him around so he’s the other way around now that I’m thinking of him as a sentinel.
“Every car has a story” but some are more compelling than others. Pete’s is right up there in the pantheon despite him sitting a bit forlornly back there.
Thanks again for this great series.
Thanks for creating this space that allows people like us to write about our stories.
I used to build office chairs out of car seats as a business. While I do agree the V70s seat is *extremely* comfortable, I am of the feeling that the 240 is more so. But comfort is so subjective. I will say I sold more Volvos than any other brand, by a long shot. The second, incidentally, was Mercedes-Benz (I’m sitting on a seat from a W114 now in my van office, my seat in my home office is a Volvo 240).
I am of the opinion, however, that seats from the Pug 505 are the absolute best. I only ever found two good ones, and I was not inclined to sell the one I built into an office chair. While it is an exceptional seat, its design makes it complicated to turn into a functional office chair, while the P2 cars, 800 series, 200 series, and 700/900 series are childsplay.
I’ve owned a 240, currently own a 164 and have driven an Amazon…no matter how comfortable the seats, it’s quite tight (I’m 6’2).
In my shop I have the drivers seat from a P71 Crown Vic and a Dodge Sebring convertible on a side by side platform on wheels…it’s the perfect garage “couch”.
Wonderful stories, and it’s been interesting to observe you evolving as a “Volvo guy”. I was one for just a few years of my youth, growing up in a Volvo family and then buying one as my first car. Even visiting the Gothenburg factory as a young child. Of course that was in the pushrod and SU era. But I sometimes wonder if I would have stuck with them if the Internet had been around and the regulating opportunity for more community. Although I was aware of IPD (and had one of their sway bars) most Volvo owners in those days were academics who seemingly only drove a car because American public transit was so bad. And back then, hitting 150k miles was an achievement.
Our ’98 S70’s seats were phenomenal. My daughter’s Rogue’s “zero gravity” seats and my 9-3’s seats are both excellent, but the Volvo’s were in another league….
Cheers to your time in New Haven. That’s where I’m from, and I get to spend 4-5 weeks a year there. I may gravitate back when I fully retire….
Our COVID experience involved dodging bullets. My wife quit her job as an ER social worker to go into private practice doing almost entirely telehealth and I bought a used pickup truck just before prices went crazy. We spent a lot of 2020 hiking and biking BLM land with a bit of kayaking.
I’ve never owned a newer Volvo after we scrapped the 164E. I’ve had relatives with early 2000s Volvos but never owned one. If I had the resources I’d love to build a coupe ute out of a station wagon
Mine experience was the exact opposite! I started just prior to COVID hitting.
I started my journey with Volvos with a 164 (that’s coming very soon) before graduating to the V70.