This is the first post in what will (hopefully) be a long series of blog posts regarding a (soon to be mine) 1999 Chevrolet Suburban C1500.... SUV? Pickup truck? It's really a blend of both with all the advantages and almost none of the drawbacks, since until the GMT900 era, the Chevrolet Suburban/GMC Yukon XL (formerly known as the GMC Suburban until the GMT800 lineup came around in 2000ish) was a stretched-cab version of the Tahoe/Yukon put on the same chassis and powertrain of the Chevrolet Silverado/GMC Sierra pickup trucks. I think they're titled as a full-size pickup truck, but they functionally straddle the line almost perfectly on both sides of that definition.
So, backstory time.
I first knew of this particular Suburban's existence around 2022 or so when I met a classmate in college that we'll refer to as BE for now. IIRC, we were leaving the main student center and I was walking back to the dorms when I saw said classmate walking to his vehicle (the aforementioned Suburban). I struck up a brief conversation about it, and then we went our separate ways.
Fast-forward a year or so, and we were temporarily relocating some of the computer setups in the E-sports lab over to the auditorium building for an event. (Interjection, I forgot to mention earlier that this one is outfitted with the rear barn door option and not a liftgate. This is better since I don't have to worry about gas lift cylinders that eventually wear out, with the usual result being a heavy liftgate dropping on somebody's head in a fashion resembling something you'd see in a Looney Tunes episode.) IIRC, all the seats were folded down except the front two, and let me tell you, this thing looked like a storage tunnel with the amount of room it had available. You could probably pack the entire E-sports lab into it not counting the tables and chairs, and you'd still have room left over to pack another event's worth of stuff into the back if you kept the seats folded down.
(If you folded all the seats up and had the optional 3rd row installed, you could still pack up the entire family for a vacation into the back of this thing, though you'd have to be fairly deliberate with your packing, something that I'm fairly well-versed at, having packed the entire take-home contents of my dorm room into something as small as a Nissan Rogue at least once in the past.)
A year or two more goes by, and BE eventually parts ways with the college I was attending and moves out-of-state, driving the Suburban down there with him. In November 2024, my old truck (a 1999 Dodge Ram 1500 with the 360c/i Magnum V8 engine and a 47RE transmission) was sold, with me netting $1000 from it, a profit that was immediately put towards building a new fileserver since the previous iteration had suffered a catastrophic failure on me that almost resulted in a data loss event. (This is internally known as the Fileserver Data Disaster of 2024, and will (eventually) receive its own separate writeup on the T3 blog.) I switched to a 2018 Nissan Rogue as a daily-driver car that I'd been gifted as a graduation present for graduating college in May 2024, and that's remained my daily driver ever since.
While it's nice (in fact, it's quite nice and very easy on fuel, averaging about 30 miles to the gallon), it still doesn't shake the fact that the late-90s is where automotive technology peaked, IMO. All the creature comforts expected of the era (power windows/locks, aircon, power seats depending on trim level, AM/FM/cassette/CD head unit, etc) with the modularity to upgrade down the road (standardized form factors for head units, speakers (to some extent), etc), but done in just the right way to be drop-dead reliable and well-understood. Proven designs built on decades of iteration and with minimal overcomplexity.
A couple more years go by, and I wanted something like the old '99 Dodge more and more, so I struck up another conversation with BE once again and brought up his old Suburban. He explained that he was also now daily-driving an economy car and that the Suburban had fallen into disuse. He was growing tired of it sitting in the driveway and eating up space, and that he was planning on selling it for junk/scrap, a plan that I decided to intervene on.
I inquired about buying it, we talked about the Suburban extensively, and we agreed on a purchase price of $2000, the price which the '99 Dodge was sold for back in November 2023. My initial plan was to fly down for a week in August 2026 to spend some time hanging out and catching up with BE (who I have not seen in person in several years now), daily-drive the Suburban while down there to get a feel for it and how it drives, and eventually drive it back home at the end of the week.
Plans of course changed, in part due to a recent promotion at the ISP that I now work at, and the initial set of plans was once again reshuffled. I figured up how much paid time-off I would have in the latter quarter of 2026, came up with 5 1-week time ranges that would work to fly down, catch up with BE, and buy the Suburban and drive back, and selected the most optimal one. As of the writing of this blog post, the PTO request that I put in for that week is pending approval.
Once my PTO request has been approved, then we'll officially be on the road to buying the Suburban, and that begins the next phase of this operation- planning the trip down and back, booking a flight, and making sure that I've got the $$$$ set aside for not only the purchase, but also for the first wave of work I'll need done on it (including the air conditioning) plus insurance and registration, since I intend to get all of that done in one shot, more or less. Other factors to consider are the price of fuel (especially since it has a 40-gallon fuel tank and it wants 93-octane gasoline, a rather eXpen$ive combination to keep fueled) and other work it'll need done, but the A/C is the most important one of the bunch since that's Not Optional(tm) in East Texas.
At any rate, that's as much as I have time to type this evening, and just about as much as I can think to type at the moment, too. Future updates will (should) be coming soon as we progress further and further towards the actual trip and transaction, and then past that point, updates and rambling about the condition of it, work to be done, and my plans for it. (I'll give you the short version of those plans now, I want to get it back to full daily-driver condition and get it looking like-new as well. BE wanted to do similar, but life has persistently gotten in the way, and somewhere along the way is a fresh coat of emerald green paint....)
Stay tuned for further updates, and more to come later!
Posted by Trifton on Sunday, August 23. 2026 in meta
The following is a direct quote of the pinned post made over on the TCG Productions blog here on trifton.net:
Hello and welcome back (or welcome in if you're stopping by for the first time)!
This is just a quick announcement post that trifton.net has officially come home! This website is now officially hosted at home as a Debian VM running on Hyperion, my main Proxmox hypervisor. I've added another blog to the matrix here, and the Trifton's World blog is once again working properly now that I'm self-hosting everything. (The TW or T3 blog will get a writeup soonish with details of how this all works, as well as what finally pushed me to move my hosting home from Whois, but that's another time for another place.............)
