My "New" Car

Ok, in the world of bloghood I have severely slacked on the postings as of late. Its been over a month, actually since my last post. Sad.

I have much to blog about though, so stay tuned for some exciting tales from my corner of the world.

First off, the long awaited car reveal! The pictures are the only ones I have of my car and were taken courtesy of my blackberry on the day I bought the car. I was so excited and wanted to send pictures of it to everyone in my address book so hooray for excitment or you would only have text and no pictures. I think the car looks kinda funny in the pictures, but, since they are the only pictures I have, they will have to suffice until I take more. If I take more...

After much deliberation, comparing, drooling, refocusing, and deep breaths, I finally decided that the car I wanted, the car I would be happy in, the car I imagined I would still be happy in until I or it died, was a Toyota Rav 4. The trouble with that, however, is that I didn't want to get anything older than a 2006. That meant I'd be skirting up in the high end of my budget, if not beyond, in most cases.

Bradford was very helpful through the entire process and even drove to and back from L.A. within a 24 hour time period to go look at a 2006 Rav 4 he found on eBay for a steal.

Unfortunately, the car in CA was not what we had expected. However, it opened up the door of searching again and through that searching we found a little credit union that had a lot of repos, one of them was a beautiful, silver, 2007 Rav 4, with barely 44,000 miles on it, 4wd, and a free roadside assistant kit that the previous owner forgot about in the trunk :)! After test driving and thinking it over for a day or so, I knew it was the car I wanted.

The nice thing about buying the car was that since it was a credit union, I didn't have to pay any of the ridiculous fees that come with buying at a dealership, and since they'd had the car for so long and wanted to get it off their hands, we talked him down to giving it to me for the blue book trade in value which was $2,500 less than what they had listed it for in the classifieds, and by far WAY less than I could get a Rav 4 for anywhere else. Especially for the year and condition it was in. I was very happy with the purchase and am still thrilled about it. I really like the car.

The only cons I can think of are: the transmission- I would have loved a manual transmission but I was having a hard enough time finding Rav 4s for sale let alone a manual transmission Rav 4. It was weird adjusting to driving an automatic after having driven a manual for so long, but it really isn't that big of a deal, it was just a preference more than anything. I also would have liked a different color. Again, a very minor, relatively irrelevant, detail but if I could have chosen any color it probably wouldn't have been the silver. I also find myself wishing it had some of the fancy gadgets and gizmos that come from newer cars these days like heated seats, navigation systems, and so on but those aren't necessities and if I really wanted to, I could get those things put in.

So, after all is said and done, I love my car, the awful and painful process of finding and buying a car is over and I am pleased as punch with my purchase.

Or rather... the bank's purchase. Ew.