I never knew that about you (
the stick shift part)! I love that!
I bet once you got the manual transmission skills down, that Honda served you well. Fantastic cars!
As a younger man in the 70's and 80's I had a series of Triumph sports cars that all were stick shifts, as my second car. The engines and manual transmissions were great, but the electrical systems were a nightmare, and a reason why the British motor industry no longer exists. Triumph Motor Company stranded me constantly from the Carter administration through the Reagan years.
But my first car as a teen? I was not allowed to even
look at my Dad's Lincoln. So my first car was a hand-me-down 1962 Volvo from my great Uncle Lars, in dull pea soup green, with about 60 horsepower, a 3 speed manual, and all the sex appeal of, well, a bowl of pea soup. It had an AM radio with one speaker in the dash, to blast Motown out of at stoplights in a brazen attempt to look cool to no one in particular.
This isn't a pic of the car my Uncle Lars passed on to me, but I Googled the model and the word "green" and found a close approximation (mine didn't have those fog lamps). Just add a faint Motown soundtrack at stoplights and a light coating of Seattle mud on the fenders, and this is it...