Last night my mate and I went to retrieve the van. I wanted him along in case the thing crapped out entirely, so I wouldn’t be stuck out in the great nothing between Fuquay and Raleigh.
We babied it carefully to the halfway point, and then pulled off to let it cool down a bit. I pulled into what looked like a functioning gas station, but what turned out to be a gas station that was still under construction. The building and the pumps were there and all lit up, but the parking lot was an unpaved mud flat. The van and the husband’s car now have a quarter inch of dried mud in the driver’s side. The side stairs of our house were covered in muddy footprints. The kitchen floor was a lunar landscape of dried mud ridges and craters.
We managed to get it the rest of the way home, although once I got off the freeway it was a bit nerve-wracking as the temperature gauge shot straight into the red and stayed there. I kept expecting the engine to seize up and wrench itself out of the chassis, or something.
My mom read my plaintive blog entry yesterday and offered to drive me around to some of the errands that have not gotten done over the school break. As we were buying some paper (so I can print out a report that’s due tomorrow), my spousal unit phoned and asked if I wanted to go vote for the city council and then look at some cars. He’d found a Honda dealership that had several new Fits on the lot.
We’ve actually been looking at cars for a while, as gas prices went up and feeding the van became more and more costly. But we’ve been spoiled by his Honda Fit. He bought that car, new, for around $16k, and now we just can’t see paying more for a used car than we would for a brand-new Fit with all the trimmings. Apparently a lot of people feel the same way, because Honda dealerships can’t keep the things on the lot for more than a week or so.
This dealership must’ve just gotten some in, because they had three or four of them on hand. We looked over the choices, picked one we liked, and got the paperwork all signed and ready to go. And just like that, I now own the first new car I’ve ever had—a storm-grey 2008 Honda Fit.
Amazing how fast my car situation went from a steaming pile of suck to a great big bucket of squee.
