A tale of 5 cars
We’ve been in possession of 5 cars in 3 weeks’ time.
Car #1: First, we had our trusty 1999 Ford Windstar. We bought the van when we lived in Iceland, when Isak was only 7 months old. We drove it all around Iceland, we drove it from Seattle to Milwaukee…we had great memories with that van.
Then, 3 days after I got off the USS Abraham Lincoln, we were sitting at a red light by Boeing when we got rear ended by a Toyota Tercel. And that little Tercel hit us so hard that it TOTALED our minivan. Now think about a minivan vs. a Tercel. Our van was a whole heck of a lot bigger. The back end was smashed in, and the right rear quarterpanel got smushed up so far that it pushed up the back door AND the front passenger side door. Here’s the only good picture I could get of the damage to our car (I didn’t have my camera with us at the time of the accident, which was probably good since everything flew around in the car, including B’s hat which flew from the front passenger seat all the way back to the trunk from the impact, and our quarters that went from the ashtray to the second row of seats.)
Car #2: So…the day we got in the accident, we were on our way to drive, for the first time, the Corvette I won playing Bingo on the ship. Lucky me, yes, but I never got to drive it because we were tied up with the accident and they ended up having to move it without us. So I never got to drive it. And we sold it shortly after the accident, so now it’s gone altogether. But! I did get to get pictures of it 
Nevermind that they spelled my name completely wrong, or that I only got pictures of it in my uniform (PR stuff for Chevrolet)…
And this one is me with the XO of the ship and the Corvette guy:
Car #3: Well, once the van got smashed, we had a Volvo station wagon rental car for a couple of weeks while we waited for the check for the car from the insurance. That was a cool car, but ridiculously expensive ($34K for a STATION WAGON??). It had all sorts of nifty features that we had fun with…but no thanks. I don’t like wagons, and I’m certainly not going to pay that much for one! We didn’t get a picture of that one, but that’s OK because it was ugly.
Car #4: So then we had to buy our own car. While dropping I off for school back when I was still on leave, I saw a cute little car on my way home and when we were online shopping for cars, it came back to me: a Scion xA. We looked at the website and the price was right, we liked the reviews, and it seemed to fit us. Small, definitely, but we don’t need as much room as we used to when we had strollers and big carseats and all that stuff. So we went to the dealership, test drove it and loved it, and bought it. Unfortunately, we needed to get it immediately and so we didn’t have time to wait for the stuff to be installed in it (stereo system, Scotchguard, HUBCAPS, lol, looked funny driving around a brand-spanking new car with no hubcaps). And that brings us to…
Car #5: We had to return the car a few days after buying it to get it all finished up, so they gave us a rental car - a Toyota Matrix. It was pretty nice! We had actually looked at that since it was a little bigger, but it was quite a bit more and the gas mileage wasn’t as good - with gas pushing $2.50 a gallon in places, we can’t afford another guzzler.
We finally got to pick up our finished car, and now we have it home and it’s a great little car. We love the color; it’s very roomy inside despite its small size; it gets 38/32 MPG and only costs $20 to fill up; and the dealership erroneously installed the upgraded stereo system so we got a free 6-CD changer! Yippee.
