New Cars!

Here we are at the Toyota dealer, already hot, crazed from stress and exhausted from trying to make decisions. We set out to visit Honda, Nissan and Toyota, all of which are within a mile or so of one another in Grand Blanc. As we set out, Simon said, "Now be prepared to walk away." Having a clearer sense of self than Simon has of himself, I said, "I can't walk away." Simon then said, "Oh, we're walking away. So get used to it." About 20 minutes after arriving at Toyota we had made our decision, and no one did any walking away.  (This is the last photo of Jami's 1997 Nissan Altima, which has taken us from Arkansas [where we bought it in, I believe, 1999] to Michigan to Los Angeles to Schenectady (sp?).  Jami was brutally unsentimental about it.  So were the Toyota people, who gave us $500 trade-in for it, two days after we spent $600 getting the alternator and battery replaced...) 
Here is Perry, our salesman. He was genuinely nice and not at all pushy or slimy.
 And here they are: The red car is my BRAND NEW (its mileometer/odometer read, I kid you not, 26 miles) Yaris (which is a silly name for a car) which was a bargain and we got with 0% interest!!!! The Prius is a 2008 (40-odd thousand miles) and was even cheaper, they were practically giving it away. Given what they sell for new and that the people we know who have one had to wait weeks for it to arrive, I can't believe they had one on the lot. Simon gets the Prius which comes with a fancy-pants touch screen to control audio and air conditioning it also tells us his mileage--so far he is getting 46.8 miles to the gallon, and that is while running errands around town. We can't wait to find out what he is going to get while driving to Ann Arbor!

Thomas has already spent hours sitting in my car, playing his DSi and whatever other secret little things he has always gotten up to while sitting in our cars on a hot summer day.  (There will be NO BASKING ON THE ROOF of the new cars!)  We alternate between beaming with joy at the pleasure of driving something that isn't rattling so loudly you can't hear yourself think, and feeling sick clenches in our stomachs at the idea of how much money we'll be paying out over the next five years.  Already the cars have had one salutary effect: after seeing scratches on the side of the Prius, Jami savagely attacked the bushes that line our driveway with electric clippers...