This is the Green Hornet. Today, after so many miles of shared experiences, we are saying goodbye.

We were its third set of owners, given this car by my father during our college years. We immediately put it to good use. Living in Seattle, we’d hardly explored outside of city limits until the Green Hornet came into our lives. While it never got much use in town during the week, every weekend it took us to new places across the state for hiking and camping. The Olympic Peninsula and the Cascades were its favorites. Every break it took us off adventuring, down to San Francisco, across Canada, back to the Midwest to visit family, and so on.

But the Green Hornet’s real life began when we graduated. We finished school a couple of quarters early and chose to spend our ‘extra’ time on a road trip all over the US. We lived together out of this car for 5 months. It was in the middle of that trip that the Green Hornet got its name from K’s Great Uncle Lawrence. We weren’t into naming cars at the time, but we’d also never been so attached to a car, and it stuck.

The Green Hornet has been to 46 of the 50 states. It has driven the whole of the Pacific Highway from San Diego up to Neah Bay. It has driven Interstate 90 from Boston to Seattle. It has been to all 5 of the Great Lakes, sampled all of the 4 major North American deserts, seen the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans.

It has transported 3 cats on 2 different occasions from Washington to Illinois, taken us to weddings and funerals, kept us in touch with friends all over the country, persevered through so many unmaintained Forest Service roads, and seen us through a state-wide house hunt before we settled here at HQ.

It has driven some 264,240 miles in its lifetime. And I am literally teary eyed at finally seeing it go. But it is time. Our road tripping days are over, and none of us are as young as we used to be.

We are donating it to KEXP, the Seattle radio station it loved the most. It will be picked up today. And then the Green Hornet will be nothing but legend.