Well, after much dis­cus­sion Greg and I decided to pur­chase a new vehi­cle. There were sev­eral rea­sons, how­ever the most impor­tant rea­son was the safety of our soon to be arriv­ing daugh­ter. We wanted the com­fort of know­ing that if one of us left the house, the other wouldn’t be stranded. We also needed room for a stroller, pack and play, toys, and so on. The Echo just was too small to make all that happen.

I spent time on line look­ing at dif­fer­ent vehi­cles and after search­ing for a while we set­tled on the new Scion xB. It seemed to offer the most room, while being quite hip and styl­ish. No mini vans in this fam­ily! So it was off to Lakeland Toyota. Which was an inter­est­ing trip in itself.

Our Echo was in the shop get­ting the oxy­gen sen­sor fixed, so we had no way to get to the deal­er­ship. Happily our friend Doug allowed us to use his Jeep if we would bring back pizza and beer to his house. At the time, we thought we were just going to look, not buy and the thought was it would be a quick look, test drive, leave. And, well… that didn’t happen.

I need to go to bed so I’m going to let Greg fin­ish this story.

We got to the deal­er­ship and it was rain­ing, not great for walk­ing around and kick­ing tires but shiny things look cool with a men­ac­ing grey sky. The sales­man was very nice and went out into the rain to bring a “Hypnotic Teal Mica” xB up to the ser­vice bay for us to look at. Wow, what a sweet car! We got in and went for a test drive. It rode very well, had far more pickup than the Echo and lots of stan­dard options. We talked about how awe­some the color was and then went back inside to say thanks and good­bye. Of course the sales­man had to ask us if we were will­ing to buy that night. I told him that we weren’t expect­ing to buy that night but we were very seri­ous and wanted him to give us a real price to think about.

He went away to do just that and had a typ­i­cal con­ver­sa­tion about what we thought. At some point I asked Kelly what we should do if he came back with a really good price. Kelly had done a ton of research in her spare time and whipped out lots of real num­bers for our house­hold bud­get. (Kelly comes pre­pared when it comes to large pur­chases.) She had also looked at a lot of local Toyota deal­er­ships to find a typ­i­cal list price.

To make a long story short, the sales­man came back with a good fig­ure, we talked the price down a lit­tle, yadda-yadda, we bought the car.
The only tough part for me per­son­ally was that we bought a man­ual trans­mis­sion at Kelly’s insis­tence. She’s been want­ing a stick-shift vehi­cle ever since I’ve known her so I didn’t have the heart to say no to her. (That and she’s preg­nant. C’mon, you try say­ing no to some­one who’s doing all the work of car­ry­ing your child.) I am of the opin­ion that auto­mo­tive engi­neers have toiled long and hard to cre­ate fan­tas­ti­cal sys­tems that do the shift­ing for us but Kelly could care less. Thus, I have dubbed the xB “her car” and the Echo “my car.” I’m not look­ing for­ward to the long, whiplash induc­ing learn­ing curve of tam­ing the stick-shift. All I know is that when the baby is com­ing and I’m in total panic, the Echo will be cho­sen to cham­pion our char­iot race to the hospital.