Tuesday, July 1, 2008

New Wheels

Well, I seem to be on about a "post-a-month" schedule, here...
Sorry to any of you who are actually checking my blog more frequently than that!

To those of you who don't know me well; I'm not exactly a car buff (unlike my husband). So for me to be actually blogging about a car is somewhat unusual.
And it's not even that the car worthy of this posting is all that special. It's not super-luxurious, or super-fast, or super-rare, or anything like that. It's just that it's so drastically much better than my previous car!

We bought two "new" cars when we moved here to the UK 8 months ago. We got a decent, not very old car for Bill, and then, since we were trying to save some money in the midst of all the spending incident to a move to a new country, we bought a much cheaper, much older, not as nice car for me. We soon learned that cars here depreciate much faster and more drastically than they do in the US. In other words, we'd overpaid for my car. On top of that, it soon showed signs of some potentially big problems.

Bill is very handy with cars and car repairs, and he did some work on it. But they have an extremely thorough annual inspection here in the UK, called MOT. If your car doesn't pass, it's illegal to drive it. We weren't sure my car would pass, which would make it quite literally worthless.
To make a few months of deliberations short; we finally decided to trade it in and get me a newer, nicer, safer, more reliable car. We got less than half of what we'd paid for my old car (only 7 months ago) back, which really stunk, and meant we had to tap into our savings a bit. But here's my new set of wheels:




As you can see, Madeline likes it, too. Even though it's not yellow, which is what she kept reminding us she wanted every time we talked about getting a new car, and even at the car dealerships. "Yellow car! Yellow car!"

It's only a year old, so it's still got two years of warranty on it, and I don't have to worry about it breaking on me in the middle of the road. And the side mirror isn't about to fall off! And it doesn't put out clouds of blue smoke when I start it! And the display lights on the dashboard aren't broken! And I can actually use my seat belt! And there are no cracks in the windshield!

And I am very happy with it. It's enough to (almost) make me like driving over here...

1 comment:

Holli said...

like the new wheels - hadn't seen it with all the other cars in my drive:)!