The Car Found
Saturday August 27, 2005
We were going to start the day with love-making but both of us were pre-occupied with dealing with getting the car so we decided to just get out and get that taken care of. Tom wanted to check out a car in a nearby village. I thought it was going to be too much trouble but he assured me it would take half an hour to get there and then we would only be about a half hour from Madison so it wouldn’t really add anything to the trip. We would be making a kind of circle is all. So off we went, maps in hand only to come to the detour for County P and then not find the point where it turned back. And besides that we totally lost P at V and 113 probably due to the fact that our map is something like 15-20 years old. It ended up taking more like an hour to get there what with the detour and not being sure where we were but the drive was beautiful. It is on a bay of the WI river with lush farmland, forested hills, and the river. We found our way to the used car business, which turned out to be a family business. We wish we could have bought a car from them as we would far rather have done business with them than the larger place we finally bought from. Tom really liked the one they had. He was all set to buy it but I don’t like the 2002 interior set up so suggested that we should at least test-drive one of the other 2001s. I also didn’t like the noise coming from the 4-wheel drive in the back when he made a tight circle. Potentially they all might sound like that but without trying another car we couldn’t be sure.
So we went back to Kayser to test drive the 2001 we had liked. My thoughts on it were that it had the lowest mileage of any of the cars that we looked at, even the 2002 Tom liked. And it was about the amount of driving one would do in a year so in my mind the wear and tear of the additional mileage canceled out the one year younger. Tom didn’t entirely agree but we did agree that if they didn’t make the same noise that we had better let the one go that was making the noise. And that is what happened. We test drove it and it didn’t make the same noise and seemed to work fine. So we ended up getting the first car we had looked at, and the one Tom said he thought we would probably end up with, the bright red 2001 Honda CRV-EX. Still by the time we had driven around and tried them out we were getting a bit tired.
Then the salesman, Lynn, was in the middle of closing another deal, so we were shown into someone else’s office and he basically ran back and forth between us handling the sales. They have someone else check out the trade in car so we filled out a form for that and he took it off to the appraiser, then dashed back to his other sale. We waited. He came back and we talked price a bit and got about what we expected to, which was $2000 more than we had wanted to spend but about in line with everything Tom had researched. I am sure that a better bargainer could have gotten more off but we were reasonably satisfied with what we got. It took about two hours though for all of the rigamarole of checking out our car, filling out papers, washing up the new car (apparently something they do with every sale), changing the license plates over, getting our stuff out of our old car (though Tom had made that an easy task by collecting it all into a basket before we ever went looking), and actually paying them, which could only be done with one of the managers. Finally it was all done and Tom and I were very tired and famished since we had ended up skipping lunch.
We drove over to Culvers and had a nice inexpensive dinner as these things go. Anything under $20 for two seems inexpensive to me now after eating out so much with Faol though there is still a voice in my head that seems to find that too much to spend very often. I would rather go far less often and then go someplace for sushi or something that may cost $40 or more for two so it is something special.
When we got home we picked up the Netflix movie in the mailbox and watched Mr. Jeckyl and Ms. Hyde. We enjoyed it. I don’t suppose it is a “good” movie in particular but generally I find that I judge movies more on my experience with them than whether they were well directed, well acted, well conceived, etc. Of course they could always have been done better but if it gave me pleasure and entertained me at the time that I saw it then the rest is unimportant to me.
I also encountered sereneshaman on yahoo. Since I don’t generally go on yahoo much in CA I had not talked with her in awhile so it was good to see her, of course, it always is, but particularly so when we can catch up a bit. And since she is my daughter-in-law I also get to find out if my oldest son is alive or not;) Jack was also online so we chatted as well. I am not online as much as I used to be or at least don’t chat as much as I did while CAW was up and running so I miss some of the people I used to see. Then again I have more time for other things I suppose.
Copyright © 2005 Kyril Oakwind