Goodbye, Hello

Today, we said goodbye to Red Storm, our Ford Freestyle. We would like to take a moment to remember him/her. As Becca puts it, "I don't know if it was a him or a her. I didn't really have an attachment to it. It was a machine." So much for personification.

Our last two cars that we sold had a lot of memories and years of use. Black Sugar: Becca's Civic that she brought into the marriage and drove 130k miles of it's 145k miles. White Stallion: a 1989 4-cyl nissan pickup with a shell, moonroof, and a blue MVP stripe that taught 5 children to drive a stick and was known by everyone at the high school that it was ours and was used for Becca and my first date (sold in 2006 with only 110k miles).

As for Red Storm, it was a good car, but not great. We put hope in a domestic model, but it had some weird issues, like a recall on the back brakes, non-standard tires (a friend with the same car drove nearly 1000 miles on a donut until they found a place that had a replacement tire - for a stock Ford car!), but was pretty fun to drive (continual variable transmission anyone?). Ford didn't market the Freestyle well so it didn't sell all that well and so they don't make the "Freestyle" anymore - it's now the Tauras X. The main problem was that whenever we had company, we had to put the back seat up and thus lose most of the cargo space. The real problem was that the middle row had two captains chairs instead of a bench and that was an issue that we didn't consider when we bought it.

To understand a little of how Becca and I work, we'll look at how we decided to buy the Freestyle. We looked at about 7-8 cars and set up a spreadsheet with gas mileage, legroom, cargo room, shoulder space, number of passengers, etc. (probably about 10 stats). We then weighted each feature by importance and added them together to find our "optimal" choice. The Freestyle won and the Honda Pilot was second. Ok, now you know we're spreadsheet nerds.

We have been contemplating selling the Freestyle while it still has some value. I guess Becca has been looking more than me because when I brought it up, she had a couple of cars picked out. We are heading to the Texas coast (called the third coast [not east coast, not west coast] by some) in May and picking my parents up at the airport in another city on the way. So when we thought about hauling our stuff down (ok, 80% of the junk would be Riley's - why do the smallest people have the most stuff?) we just couldn't imagine how we could fit it all in with the back seat up. So, in other words - Mom and Dad, you owe us the difference! Just kidding.

We have purchased our last two cars (and now 3) at a place called Driscoll Motors. For anyone in Austin, we highly recommend it - the prices even surprised our bank last time when we got the loan. They basically buy cars from all over and sell them to dealers, but the public can also buy them. They might not be all cleaned up, but you know what you are getting. It's worked for us. They offered a fair price to trade-in our Freestyle (which we bought from them), so we more or less swapped cars.

So, introducing ____________ (needs a name - please leave a comment for your suggestion), our new Honda Pilot. BTW, we got lucky with what they had because it has leather seats, a built-in DVD system, and other nice features that we know we'll come to love and have to have in future family cars.

These are just Google pictures (the colors are correct), so don't think we went out and drove to the woods for a photo-op with the new used car.