The Aerie
Expensive weekend. I think I spent more this weekend than at any time since I bought my house 15 years ago. Certainly the week itself has been so.
We kicked everything off with a five-figure check to start the contractor on the remodeling project. Then on Saturday we test drove a vehicle to replace our minivan, and we drove to the travel agency and purchased our tickets to Germany this summer. One nice side effect was that the airline tickets seemed positively cheap by comparison. After test-driving the car to the travel agency we drove back to the dealership to purchase it. All in all, we spent almost two thirds as much as we did when we bought our house back in '91.
To answer everyone's question, it's a 2005 Pontiac Montana SV6. We bought it because the sticker said it had only 5200 miles on it. However it actually had 7200 miles on it - according to our salesperson one of the employees used it as a 'demo' vehicle, meaning they drove it around for free for two months.
This isn't actually the car I wanted to buy. The car I wanted to buy is a hybrid-fuel seven-passenger minivan. Unfortunately the car I want to buy doesn't exist yet. The only hybrid seven-passenger vehicle right now is the considerably-more-expensive 2006 Toyota Highlander SUV, and they're hard to come by. Of course, the vehicle I wanted to buy was a 2010 seven-passenger hybrid minivan, but that choice was taken away from me by a delusional, bellicose lout.
Anyway, it has a lot of nice features, like a DVD player, and CD-Mp3 capability. Also sorts of dashboard geewgaws: the radio shows you the name of the song that's playing, the dashboard has printed messages to help explain the car like "LOW FUEL," "MILEAGE 15.4 MPG", "OIL 32% UNTIL CHANGING" or "ENGINE DISABLED BY ALIEN SHIP."
But for all that, I don't care. Buying a car used to be exciting, but this time it was merely a very expensive chore. I think this was because the prior van had been working absolutely fine. Most times when I've bought a car it has been under duress. In fact last summer's purchase of my Plymouth Neon was the first time I ever bought a car when I strictly didn't have to (and, interestingly enough, if I had not bought it we would have been in real trouble since I don't know if the family would have fit in the Metro for the week it took to replace the van). This time, since there was nothing wrong with the van, the experience was unrewarding. There were no sudden realizations like "I won't have to replace that broken windshield wiper!" or "I won't have to listen to that rickety van door slam shut again," or any of those little reliefs you get when moving out of a rattletrap old car.
Instead it was simply "Great, now I'm back in hock again."
Because of course for better or worse this year we need the cash: so the insurance payment goes into the bank with the rest of the remodeling money, and the car is completely financed. I'll worry about paying for it AFTER our August trip.
Posted by Albatross at April 3, 2006 11:30 PM | TrackBack