Old Car and Bike rambling

I had a bit of a windfall in January when I sold the Tesla stock I purchased 1 month earlier and made a nice percentage gain of 50%.   Although I had hoped to use the proceeds from the Tesla stock to actually buy a Tesla, I had no where near enough money to get one of those cars and didn't want to hold the stock long enough for that to happen since I have no idea how long it would take. (looking back I now realize that if I had held out for another month, I would have gained 100%, oh well) I started looking for a replacement car for my wife and was thinking either Mazda CX3,Toyota Prius, or Toyota RAV4. CX3 are too new to hit my price range without high miles, but not many available for sale. RAV4 is surprisingly also hard to find since people must be holding on to their cars for a long time due to extreme reliability. I thought a Prius would be easy to find since I live in truck country and nobody really cares about saving gas when it's selling for $2 a gallon but Toyota Pr...

My $500 Honda Accord has been a great car and we drove it all over the country in the first few years.  With the loss of our Kia Sportage we started to rely on it much more for daily duty until my wife got into an accident which is essentially a mirror of the damage it received when my brother in law owned the car. The repair estimate for what looked like moderate damage was $5400.  I understand with the previous accident history, there's little point in paying this kind of money to repair it, but I know there's still lots of life left in it as an around town car or to let my daughter use it as a junker. I'm having the car towed back from the collision place and hope to replace a few suspension components and have a mostly working car even if it's not visually perfect. Easy come, easy go? Maybe not. I don't want to junk another car if I can help it. I should have the Honda back on the road with the new rear control arm and we should be able to drive it to g...