Ringing In the New Year in a Big Way

This was a good van.

We bought it used, four years old, with low mileage. It has brought home two of our babies from the hospital after they were born, taken us safely on several road trips, successfully navigated countless parking lots of doom, rushed us to the ER in the middle of the night when someone couldn't breathe and then back home again, relieved, when modern medicine did its job. It has a kickin' stereo, so BDF didn't feel like QUITE the fuddy-duddy when he drove it. It handled well, more like a car than the van it is. It has been slept in, spilled on, bled on, thrown up in, thrown up around, drawn on, filled with sand and emptied again. It has transported appliances when we couldn't wait for the store to deliver.

It was filled with love and life.

But now it needs a transmission, a repair that costs more than the value of the vehicle. I am not sure what its fate is now; it will either be sold for parts and scrap, or donated to a worthwhile charity (who will then sell it for parts and scrap, I think, due to the aforementioned transmission problem).

So now, now we fill this one. With life.

An '08 Toyota Sienna, with 37 miles on it, most of them put on by us. The van I wanted to buy on Saturday, when we first drove it, before BigDaddyFish lobbied a case for having an 8-passenger van. This one is a 7 passenger. 8-passenger vans are in short supply, and if they had offered us an 8-passenger with the sound system we wanted in a color we didn't find abhorrent we would have bought it. Probably. But they didn't. We could only get the color we wanted, and Thugs R Us seemed unenthusiastic about what it would take to rip out the standard sound system and put in a new one. So BDF began to have fifth tenth second thoughts, and we weighed the benefit of the 8th seat versus the problem of the stereo (yes, we are musicians. Sort of. And we are stereo snobs. Especially Even in our minivan.) So after I killed him in the parking lot of the dealer we discussed it at length, we thanked the nice man for going to Baltimore to get us a van that we decided not to buy, and bought the one I drove on Saturday, the one that felt right, like MY van, the second my ass hit the seat. And told the guy we'd take him out to dinner, and felt especially guilty when his little girls called from home to tell him goodnight for the second time while we were doing our paperwork. It has a good enough sound system, complete with MP3 capability and iPod jack, oh, yeah, and a DVD player. And cloth seats, just like I wanted.

It feels like a present from my grandfather, because his legacy afforded us the down payment. Here's to him, and his love, and really, really smart investments.

Happy New Year, indeed.

Comments

[angi]

CONGRATS!
I love the color. And a DVD player?? Lucky you (err...I mean, lucky kids) Just imagine how quiet road trips might be now :)

[soccermom of 4]

The last time we got a newer vehicle, we donated the "trade-in" minivan. Ours didn't have any mechanical trouble, just really old and really rusty, but started good in winter and ran good. They were thrilled to get it and had it sold in one day.

This place also takes in vehicles that need work because they use them as teaching tools for the other part of their program, which is teaching job skills, even if it would be just tearing apart the vehicle for scrap parts or maybe use those parts to "complete"/fix a different vehicle that had something else wrong with it.

It was win/win for us. The car dealership was only going to give us $100 for our old minivan. We can claim the $100 as a donation on our taxes this year, and they sold it for $500 to a family who really, really needed it but had limited funds.

Enjoy your new minivan. I love the color.

[Izzy]

This is kind of weird. It was an unexpected and rather sizable monetary gift from my 91 yr old biological grandfather, whom I've never met in person, that allowed us to buy our new (used) van and not have a car payment. And it is most definitely due to his very smart investments! Congrats on your priddy new Sienna! I totally covet :)