hahaha Mark i can't believe you remembered that my driveway used to be gravel. yeah the gravel was starting to thin out pretty bad so we caved in and paved it last September. it's alot better now, we also widened it.
and you're right, the van is fun to drive because you can load it up with people. that's the main thing i'll miss when i finally get my 2-seater RX-7.
my van got the nick-name "party van", because at one of my partys a couple of months ago, we crammed 11 people into it and hotboxed the shit out of the thing. we were all sitting very comfortably in chairs or on the floor, we had the radio going, we all had drinks, a couple bags of chips, and we were all nice and high. we must've chilled in there for half an hour, all the while there were 20 or so other people in my house partying as well. so my buddy who was sitting in the driver's seat wrote "PARTY VAN NUMBER 1 FOREVER" in the fog on the windshield, and from that day forward it's been known as the party van. i keep a bottle of Febreze in there all the time now...
it's also affectionatley known as Big Red. but the fucking thing is on it's last legs. it's a '98 and now has 302,XXXkm on it. fucked up brakes, rust holes in the roof and rockers, blown rear struts, fucked up tail-gate latch (hence the tape), broken AC, broken CD player, fucked up alignment, extremely hard-shifting tranny, exhaust leak, broken front grille (from hitting a bird)...and that's just the stuff i remember. the list goes on.