Takin' it easy...

Wow, last week was one crazy week. Daniel played the guitar at the wedding of one of his roommates on Saturday. It was an outdoor wedding, and Daniel played with a flutist - who turned out to be my 1st cousin once removed! We left Friday afternoon for the rehearsal Friday evening... but that's getting the cart ahead of the horse in the events leading up to leaving.

Our lovely car, a '96 Lumina, runs like a smooth, well oiled machine. But is has an illness that is currently in "remission" and we have no idea when it's going to give up the ghost. Well, not literally, but some major work would be required to keep it running. We have been planning our big summer vacation for some time now, and knew we would be driving the whole way. Our vacation plans take us cross-country, so quite a few miles far from home. First we talked about renting a car, but when we started checking into that, it was going to be more $$ than we really wanted to shell out just to drive a car for 2 weeks. Now, we could've easily gotten a better deal if we didn't have to go out of a certain territory, but once we go past a certain point, the rental fee went out the roof. So, we scrapped that idea. We felt like that much money would be more wisely spent on a "new" car whenever the time came.

So, the decision was made to drive our car out west and just hope that it held up, and if not... well, we'd be buying a car. We don't have any way to know if the Lumina will hold up for another 10 miles or 100,000. It would take almost what the car is worth to fix it, and Daniel didn't want to do that.

Tuesday evening on his way home from work, Daniel called and asked me "so where you serious when you mentioned just buying a new car for the trip?" I had mentioned in, mostly joking. We talked about it (since we would at some point need to get another car anyway to replace the Lumina whenever it croaks) and I ended up looking through the classifieds while he came home. I found 2 cars that fit our criteria, and he called about them as soon as he got home. The first place didn't answer, the second one did. It sounded good enough that we made arrangements to go look at it that evening. We took it for a test drive and liked it, but the price was a bit steep for our budget. Daniel told the guy he'd call him in the morning to let him know. We also let him know that we were going out of town Friday, so if we would get it, we'd need to have it by Thursday so we could get all the title and insurance stuff taken care of. The seller was fine with that.

We did our research Tuesday evening and realized that he was basing his asking price off the retail value of the car and not the private sale value - quite a bit of difference! Wednesday morning Daniel called him and made an offer that was substantially lower than what he was asking and still under our "we won't pay more than X for it". The guy accepted it right away! We were a little amused (not really) that when Daniel told him that we'd done some research and come up with the same numbers as he had (in value), the guy said "well, I wouldn't lie to you!". Hmm... but whatever.

We met the guy Wednesday evening and bought it! Thursday morning we spent about 1/2 an hour in the DMV getting the title switched over (yes, only 1/2 hr!! We got there before they opened) and I called and got insurance put on it and drove to the county office and bought a county tag.

I know you're all curious what it is...

Warning: It's a granny car. When Daniel and I realized what we were considering buying, we laughed and laughed.

It's a 2002 Buick Le Saber. White.

Today we passed one that was baby blue, and I said I was really glad it wasn't baby blue, cause that would fur shur be a granny car!! Daniel said he would've never considered buying it if it had been baby blue for that reason. We joke that we need to do something to it to make it more "our generation"... maybe some flames down the sides, or put big rims on it and jack it up (or lower it) just a bit, or dual exhaust straight pipes, or even some fuzzy dice hanging from the rear view mirror. So far the only thing we've done to it is ride it :)

Ahh, it rides so nice :) Just 2 weeks ago we were talking about how big cars kinda "float" down the road, instead of "bumping" down the road (over dips and bumps). This car definitely has a nice "float" factor.

We're really enjoying all the bells and whistles it came with that our other car doesn't have. A cd player, leather seats, TWO!! cupholders (one had broken in the Lumina), automatic seat adjusters, and so on and so forth. It has buttons for heated seats, but we know the driver's seat doesn't work, and I haven't tried the passenger's seat in case it comes on and I can't get it to go off and we're riding down the interstate :P

So yeah, back to it all... We're on vacation! We're driving out to visit my sister and are spending the nights on the way out with friends and relatives :) We have a house sitter keeping the home-fires burning this time, which is nice! I'm a little bummed that the timing as far as the garden has ended up not the best. My beans are in the middle of coming in, and the tomatoes and peppers will be ready whenever they decide to turn their proper color, and I'm not 100% sure that the first corn won't be ready while we're gone, either.

We did pack our laptop and the cord for the camera, so hopefully I'll be able to post some pictures here and there. Right now I'm using our friends computer :)

It is technically 11:00, but since we've travelled from the Eastern Time Zone into the Central Time Zone, my body is sayin' it's midnight. And I was up till after 1am last night, so I'm about ready to call it a day. Daniel is playing the guitar with Aaron (the friend we're staying with tonight), we don't see him very often and whenever we do, guitars always come out!! In the meantime, I think I'm going to brush my teeth and go to bed.

P.S. Know anybody that wants to buy a used car? :P