New car!!

We bought a new car on Saturday.

We have a 2004 Chevy Venture minivan, which is pretty much "my" car, and my husband's ride was a 1995 Ford F-150 pickup. Well, when gas prices started going out of control 3 years ago, it wasn't practical for him to drive the pickup to work since it got 12mpg, so he started driving the van, which gets about 24mpg. Therefore, since I do childcare and can't take more than 2 kids at a time in the pickup, I was without a vehicle during the day. Most of the time it didn't bother me, but on a nice day, it would've been nice to be able to go to the park or library. So now Hubby drives the new car, which gets 31mpg, I have my van back, and we got rid of that gas-guzzling pickup.

The other issue is that Hubby builds and flies model airplanes and used the pickup to haul them to the field. In order to get a more economical vehicle, he thought about getting a small car that could tow a little trailer. You know... those little ones that U-Haul rents out. Well, then we went to a Chevy dealer and he showed us an HHR. It looks a lot like the PT-Cruiser, which is a Chrysler. Chevy's version is a little longer and a little wider. The great feature is that when you fold down the back seats, it has 5 ft of cargo space. If you fold down the front passenger seat as well, you get 8 ft (on that side, of course). So this seemed like the perfect solution to us.

At first we were looking at a used one, but GMC was offering 2.9% financing on new vehicles compared to the 6.25% loan we would have used on a used car. So for not very much more per month, we decided on the new car. I'll admit it's a little weird looking, but it grows on you. It is designed after the 1949 Suburban. Both pictures below. Hubby talked them into installing running boards on it for free. They'll be installed next week.

One neat thing about it is that a button on the remote allows you to start the car before you get in it. You could stand at your living room window, push a button to start your car, and it would be warmed up by the time you get in it. Oh, and it comes with one year of On-Star, which we're discovering is pretty cool, and 3 months of XM radio. We have Sirius in the van and love it, but XM is great too.