How about a car?

We need a car! For the moment, we are using the car of a friend of a friend: an old Nissan Sentra, which seems to be the official beater car of Guam:

The window tint keeps out the equatorial sunshine

This car has been heart-ing Guam for a long, long time...

But we only have access to this car until April Fool's Day (no coincidence, I'm certain!), so we need to get some wheels of our own, and fast. 

I guess the appropriate term for a used car, bought on Guam, with the intention of eventually abandoning when one moves back to the States, is "Guam bomb" - and a Guam bomb may be what we end up with, in which case it will probably be an old Nissan Sentra. But we have hopes of grander things! 

One we've been talking about is an Alfa Romeo spider of the late 80's - black on dark grey with soft and hard tops. It's not a model that either of us was ever excited about, until we saw it sitting by the side of the road the first day we were here. Since then it has burned its way into our hearts so that neither of us can really stop thinking about it, even as we insist to ourselves that it would be insane to trust it as a daily driver. With the black paint the black rubber components become much less objectionable, and there's something incredibly enticing about the idea of zipping around this little mountainous island in an Italian two-seater... 

Of course, it's a convertible - we figure that, like a home with an ocean view (did I mention that we're looking for a home with an ocean view?), if we're on Guam we might as well go for something with a removable top. When will we ever again live in a place with an endless succession of perfect summer days? 

So the other car we're thinking about is a convertible Mustang from 2000 - ugly body style, but good everything else. It's a V-6, so the gas consumption would probably not be TOO bad ... and no doubt it would be much more durable than a pretty Alfa. At least we could probably trust the local mechanics to take care of it. 

Although, oddly, the auto shop in front of which the Alfa is parked has an 8C Competizione on its sign, as if they regularly service Italian performance vehicles. Hmm! 

And all of this may be premature - we haven't actually looked at these cars carefully and we have no idea how well they've been maintained or how much rust the conceal. Either way, we'll have to move fast - April will be here soon! And we may end up with a Sentra after all...