Meet Ginger
About a month ago, my 2001 Honda Odyssey started making the same noise Lilith produced a few months before her transmission imploded and we had to junk her (she went to a program for veterans, so she's not in a landfill somewhere at least). I've had a couple of mechanics look at it, and they all said, eh, nothing to worry about... yet. But I was worried... I had the feeling, as woo as it might be, that the van was approaching catastrophic failure and giving me as much warning as possible so I could do something about it, that same as Lily did.
This time, I listened.
Since 90% of my driving is just me and Linc, and we're getting ready to drive out to California, we thought we'd downsize. We figured that even with 90K miles and a potentially iffy tranny, the van should get us some amount of trade-in if it was still running (certainly more than if it wasn't). After a couple of weeks of Internet research, I decided to start test driving. Friday and Saturday, I visited dealers, got trade-in quotes, and dove into negotiations.
Monday, we finished signing all the papers. It's official... she's ours now (or rather, she belongs to the bank and they are very kindly letting us drive her). We never would have considered a new vehicle, but the dealership was doing a 0.9% financing deal, and the resulting cost for this 2011 car wound up being around the same we paid for an eight-year-old van 18 months ago. The track record on the Honda Fits are terrific, the resale value is great, the mileage approaches that of the Civic Hybrid (we're getting 26mpg city driving so far, and can expect 35mpg... or better... on the highway), and their owners are really happy campers.
I'm also a little bit proud of myself. I walked away from several dealerships during the info-gathering phase (which sales folks really don't like), managed to not get my credit report queried until the deal was almost done (last time we went looking, a mad salesman ran our credit something like eight times, which slapped a big red flag on our already foreclosure-crippled rating and got us stuck into a really horrible high-rate loan... I was NOT going to let that happen again!), and got a good chunk knocked off the sticker price.
She's a Honda Fit SE, which means Sport Edition... I really needed cruise control, and that was the only model that offered it. There were 14 miles on the odometer when I got the keys. For a compact car, there is a surprisingly large amount of room inside... even for my considerable rear. In fact, that was where I first started considering a really small car... I thought all the compacts would be way too dinky for me, but some of the folks over at Fatshionista convinced me otherwise.
Now to get this road trip organized!