The Best Laid Plans

We ended up buying a new car Monday. The shop called about the VUE and it was going to be $1,900 to fix (and there was the possibility that it might creep up a bit from there) and, well, the car was not worth much more than that. Plus it had an electrical problem that is, as of now, intermittent but we figured that was only going to get worse with time. So we called it.

The idea of nursing it along wasn't going to be particularly viable since the problem causing the noise was one of those things you don't want to be driving around in the car when it finally explodes. (Not a literal explosion, but close.) I'm not one of those really technical car people, so I can't tell you what it was - I wrote it down to tell Tim and I'm sure I sounded like I was reading a foreign language phonetically.

So when Tim got home, we swung by and picked up the condemned, called my sister and had her come over to watch the doodle and went out on a fact finding mission. Since I'd driven the Sienna, we figured we'd go ahead and drive an Odyssey and, possibly, the Mazda 5 as well. But the Mazda dealer had moved and I didn't see their new location til we were past it, plus the Honda dealer closes at 8 (which honestly seems early for a car dealer, but whatever) and it was already a quarter after 7. So we test drove an Odyssey and while I liked it, I didn't think I liked it quite as much as the Sienna. So I dragged Tim over to the Toyota dealer (which is connected by the same driveway - they apparently dislike each other greatly) and we re-drove the Sienna and agreed that, yes, it was a bit nicer than the Odyssey. I'm guessing the main reason is that with the price differentials, we could get more luxury in the Toyota for the same price as a slightly more stripped down Odyssey. But the other thing? The seats on the Toyota are much cushier - the Odyssey has seats more like an SUV (firm, less cushion). And when Tim is going to have to be in a car for more than 10 minutes, he needs cushion (I bring enough natural cushion that it's less of an issue for me).

So we considered for a bit and after a bit of discussion arrived at a price that we were happy with and they were happy with and they even gave us $1K for the VUE (we totally got the better end of that deal) and so we emptied out the VUE, said goodbye to my relatively new geek family sticker on the rear window, and drove home at about 11:30. (Why does buying a car take so stinking long?) We found a tired sister and an awake kiddo. (This sparked off the illness that has plagued him the rest of this week - I'm guessing maybe he already didn't feel well.) We also found that a van does, in fact, fit into the garage. So that's good.

We also discovered that the other car was running hot, so rather than getting to bask in the joy of my new car, I got to take the other car to the shop on Tuesday while Tim took my new car off on a business trip to Baltimore (just far enough away that he stayed overnight.) The other car still isn't back, so he took my new car again today. One of these days, I'm going to get to drive the thing.