*A New Car!

*Cue Don Pardo voice, or reasonable facsimile.

It's true, after all these years, I finally have a new car! The last time I had a new car, Julie was still in my tummy, so yeah, it's been a while.

We ended up with a 2012 Honda Pilot, an SUV that is in fact a bit smaller than the Honda Odyssey minivan that I traded in (for a paltry $1000—if only I'd thought to do this a week before the transmission went kaplooey!). It is very fancy-shmancy and has lots of features I've yet to figure out in the 24 hours or so that I've had it. What I have figured out is that I can "pair" my iPhone to it and make hands-free calls or listen to my iTunes via Bluetooth or USB (without the plug-in radio doohickey). Way cool. There's a built-in GPS, which will reduce both the number of times I get lost and the number of amusing blog posts I write about getting lost (hey, technology is a double-edged sword).

The only problem is that the passenger-side window goes all the way down when you press AUTO, but then when you press AUTO again, it goes all the way up—and then back down a few inches. They couldn't figure out why this was happening, so I'm bringing it back in this week and they'll replace the whole thing. 

I feel much higher up in the Pilot than I did in the Odyssey, but it's a foot shorter and almost an inch narrower, so parallel parking ought to be a bit easier. A near deal-breaker was that there's nowhere to put coins! What were they thinking?

I will not miss all the scratches and dings and ground-in Goldfish cracker crumbs in my old Odyssey, but I will miss the sliding doors and the best bumper sticker ever.

Comments

[Lorena]

I'm kind of smirking here...over the years I always remember you being critical of SUV drivers/owners...and I always had one, felt I needed one....and here you are now owning one - I got rid of mine last month after 15 years of driving SUV's...and now am driving a Nissan car...I miss my SUV though!

[Karen]

Well, I am still critical of those giant gas-guzzlers, especially when owned by people who could easily get by with someone considerably smaller. This SUV is in fact smaller than a minivan and the mileage difference is a whopping 1 mpg. Anyhow, someday I hope to be back into a sedan, once I'm done carting kids around! I'm dreaming of a Mini Cooper. :)

[Stephanie]

Happy and Safe Driving. I am sure that you will be writing about how much YOU love the car!

And no place to put coins? I guess where those engineers live, they have FAST LANE and meters that accept credit cards!

[Chris Hughes]

Congrats K! Nothing like a new car to elevate your mood. For a few weeks, anyway. Huge Honda fan, hope you like it, and may it last 200,000 trouble free miles. Next, we need to get you thinking about two wheels...

The coin thing - you progressives up in NE still actually have to stop at a toll booth and deposit coins? Don't you know what that is doing to the ice caps? Hello.....toll tags?

:-)

[Karen]

Ha ha, yes we do have a Fast Pass for tolls, but we also have these things called PARKING METERS -- although they're starting to get rid of them and replace them with those computerized things, which are a pain in the butt in my opinion.