I’ve owned two Jeep Wranglers in my lifetime. I had a blast with both. The very first vehicle I bought for myself with my own paycheck was a 1991 Jeep Wrangler. It was blue with a khaki interior. I loved that Vehicle. After graduating from Michigan State University and going through the ROTC program there, I was a newly commissioned second lieutenant in the United States Air Force. I had to wait about a year to go on active duty, but once I had my first set of orders, the first thing I did was go down and buy this vehicle. I took it with me to my first duty Station at Keesler Air Force Base, Mississippi, where I was for training and then onto my follow-on assignment at Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota. If you know much about North Dakota, there’s a “woman behind every tree” as we used to say, and there aren’t many trees. So for a young single guy, we had to keep ourselves busy and out of trouble some other way. That Wrangler took me camping, hunting, and fishing throughout the wilds of North and South Dakota, northern Minnesota, and southern Manitoba and was the only thing that kept me sane. Shortly after I arrived I made a group of good friends that I shared these adventures with and I inspired one of them to get his own wrangler. Good thing too because we tended to go places where we got stuck and were inevitably pulling each other out. I ended up taking that first wrangler to Guam, where I continued the fun, one day fearing, I would have to abandon it in the boonies I had gotten it so stuck and so far out of a mountain while looking for a waterfall. I had just just about give up and was ready to start the approximately 10 mile jungle hike when we were assisted by some local Chamoro’s who had spotted the Jeep from a distance and were on their way to “ salvage it” before they ran into us. With their assistance, we were finally able to get it out. About two months before I was supposed to leave the island someone stole my hardtop which was sitting on my patio and then a week later they came back and took my hard doors. Since it was gonna cost the insurance company more than 80% of the value of the vehicle to replace those and then have them shipped out to Guam. They simply totaled the vehicle. So I took the insurance money and threw it down on a new ‘95 Wrangler when I PCSed to Columbus Air Force Base, Mississippi for flight training. This new Wrangler was the same color and aside from the updated role bars was exactly the same as the old one. It took me through follow-on assignments back in North Dakota (only this time at Minot… yes I got to see both sides of the beautiful peace garden state), Goodfellow Air Force Base in west Texas, Royal Air Force Station Mildenhall in the United Kingdom, Hurlburt Field, Florida, and finally to Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. By the time we got to Langley we had two kids. Getting one child seat was possible in the old jeeps, but two was nearly impossible. So as much as it killed me, I ended up selling my beloved Jeep there, and buying a “practical Family vehicle” a 2005 Dodge Durango. That was a good Vehicle that saw the family through many cross-country trips and camping trips, but it wasn’t the same as having a true off-road vehicle and I truly missed those experiences. So after our eventual three kids grew up and two had moved away, and it was time to replace the Dodge Durango, which had about 250,000 miles on the odometer, I started thinking back to my jeeps. What killed me was that everybody and their brother seemed to have one now. And though I did kind of like the new gladiators, it seemed almost impossible to find what I was looking for in a manual transmission. And for the life of me, I just couldn’t force myself to buy a jeep in an automatic transmission. It almost seemed blasphemous. In all seriousness, one of the things I really enjoyed about my old wranglers was the fact that they were very basic vehicles, and I could take them as a young man who wanted to learn vehicle maintenance skills to the base hobby shop and do much of the work on them myself. But like everything else, they had evolved into plug-in play type vehicles that were too complicated to do most maintenance for the average person by now. And the real dealbreaker, the thing that absolutely killed it for me, was all those damn ducks.
When the Bronco was introduced, I certainly took notice I loved it’s classic rugged lines and yet with a refined modern touch; and the more I looked into it the more I loved it. Four-wheel drive vehicles had certainly come a long way since I had last used and abused them. But then again, I wasn’t the young man. I was back then either. I found myself in my late 50s deciding that some of the creature comforts of the new Bronco might not be so bad after all and that they will probably be easier to stomach on a vehicle that I wasn’t as familiar with as the Jeep. The final thing that sold me was when I went to one of the local dealerships and saw the 2025 Heritage edition in blue and white. What a beautiful Vehicle! I had admired some of the other trims and paint schemes, but I fell in love with this one on site. All I had to do was convince the wife that the extra $10,000 over what she had expected was worth it
Looking back. I haven’t regretted a thing. A couple of months after purchase I was able to celebrate my birthday by going to Bronco‘s 60th anniversary birthday bash at Silver Lake dunes in Michigan and had a wonderful time. To be there having fun with hundreds of fellow Bronco owners, all friendly, amazing people just reinforced that I had not just purchased a vehicle, but joined a family of great folks who love this great Vehicle. I look forward to getting out with many of you again someday.
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