2008 January | Saablime - the Saab 99 Turbo Blog

Not for everyone. Essential to a few.

Sunday, January 6th, 2008

While I’m waiting for my 99 Turbo to get out of the shop (it’s been in there since October due to some hard-to-find parts), I added my latest dream SAAB to the collection: a 1988 900 SPG. I found it in Los Angeles with only 67,000 miles on it. Black, gray interior. Definitely has some clean up to be done but overall in great shape.

I’ve really been enjoying this car that was spawned by the 99 turbo. Feel like I am completing the necessary circle. Plus this was the first SAAB I fell in love with back in the mid-80s during college in Colorado.

Getting this car was also rewarding because I found my first SAAB in LA in Spring 2000. It was a 1993 900 turbo convertible which I found on Saabnet (http://saabnet.com). I bought that car to impress a girl I was dating. Flew down on a Friday morning and had a blast of a drive to meet her for the weekend back home in Northern California (my car before that was a Toyota minivan with about 180,000 miles so it was quite a step up!)
So I got to relive that trip a bit when I took a similar flight down to pick up the SPG, only this time I was joined by that girl who is now my wife (and we have 3 kids). We took our oldest, my 12-year-old stepson Landon, with us. I was excited to share this with Landon as I had shared flying up to pick up the 99 turbo in Seattle with my other son Jaden when he was 3 in 2005.

On the way back we picked up the 2 little ones for the final 4 hours of the trip to Cottonwood, California.

With the SPG, I finally made a breakthrough with Landon, who’s increasingly an ornery teenager with a lot of opinions. I’ve had a lot of great times with my boys, heading off into the mountains or down to the river in one of the Saabs on a weekend. But Landon never thought much of the cars.

He finally said he actually thought the SPG was ‘really cool’ and since then has not stopped bugging me to have it when he turns 16 (not a chance!).

During our great road trip he said, “Most people don’t like Saabs… that’s their problem.”

I agreed with him, and shortly thereafter came up with the tagline, “Not for everyone. Essential to a few.” That’s been a theme of my life. Most of popular culture doesn’t appeal to me. I’ve found a few things though that I really, really love. And those things bring a lot of happiness and meaning to my life. And in these things I have been lucky to find a certain caliber of people. People with a certain heightened sense of quality and values.
I am grateful for those of you who have joined me here. In the scheme of things, there are not a lot of us, but our passion is huge. And our commitment is important.

And I suspect you are working hard to do significant things with your life. And when you can, it just feels good to take a break and go for a drive, work on, or just sit back and appreciate, your cool old Saab.

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Not for everyone. Essential to a few.

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