So, we bought a new car!

We have been thinking about replacing our car for a while. When we bought the Focus back in ’03, we said that we’d start looking for a new car when the extended warranty ran out. It did so in August of ’10.

The Focus had been a good car for us, mostly. The trunk was a little odd. A bit smaller than it appeared, with a shape that didn’t exactly maximize the utility of the storage More irritating was that, if you put the back seats down to increase storage, it didn’t help that much. The floor of the trunk sloped down from the back, while the “floor” created by the folded down seats sloped up. The “pass through” was much smaller than the height of the trunk, so much so, that if you couldn’t really fit any single object long enough to need the folded space. We could actually store more stuff by leaving the seats up and just putting things on the back seats.

That had annoyed me for years. We sort of got used to it.

Then the trunk latch got flaky, not wanting to lock at random times. And the gas mileage wasn’t what it used to be. The stereo had developed a few quirks that could be quite annoying. There were lots of little ways that the car just wasn’t quite meeting our needs.

I’d researched cars for a while. Several friends have owned Subarus, including one who had had the same Subaru for just about 20 years, and they all reported being pleased with the cars. And everything I’d learned during the research indicated they were well made cars.

But being the disorganized and busy people we are, we kept not getting further than researching. So when I picked up Michael after work on Friday, I told him that I really, really, really wanted to go look at cars this weekend, and if possible pick one.

Saturday I got my errands run earlier than usual. We stopped at Mr Gyro’s for lunch (I didn’t want either of us to be hungry or cranky while looking at cars). Then we went to the Subaru lot that’s about a mile and a half from our house.

One complication to this was that I had suggested that a bunch of our friends should meet at our place to head over to the movie theatre that’s about a mile from our place to watch the 6:45 showing of Avengers. I figured we’d look at some cars, maybe test drive one, get the paperwork rolling… and have to wait a few days before we could pick up our car.

I had been slightly interested in an Impreza. I know it’s the smaller model, but if the trunk was better than the Focus, I wouldn’t have minded. Except as soon as I sat behind the wheel I knew it wasn’t the car for me. Michael (who has much longer legs and needs more headroom) couldn’t really fit comfortably in either the front or back seat. So it was out.

The Forester’s pictures had given me the impression it was bigger than the Outback, so I hadn’t paid as much attention to it during our research phase. Both of us did enjoy sitting in it, and the test drive was nice. Plus, it was available in Ruby Red with the light interior, and that was one of the colors I was interested in.

Then we test drove the Outback. I did not want to go back to the lot. I would have kept driving for a long time, if we could have.

The sales guy had us pull into an auxiliary lot not far from the main one. Years ago the auxilliary lot had been a Ford dealership. The very Ford dealership where Ray and I had bought the Escort we’d owned before I bought the Focus. He wanted us to walk around and look at more color combinations. The first one he showed us was the Indigo Pearl (deep blue with a pearlescent tone). Because a lot of the cars were dusty, he rubbed a big clean spot on it with his hand, so we could see the color. We walked around and looked at a bunch. Then went back to the main lot to start making some decision.

Their appraiser had looked at the Focus and taken it on a drive while we were out and about. He wanted to know if we would leave my purple (with dragonflies) seat covers, because he thought it would be easier to sell that way. Our sales guy told him “surely they plan to take them.” I said no. While I love those seat covers, we bought them just a month after buying the Focus. They’ve been on the seats for nine years. I suspect if we tried to pull them off, the elastic parts would crumble, and there’s no way they’ll stretch over new seats.

I tweeted, at that point, the question, “Indigo Pearl or Cypress Green?” It was amusing how many people guessed that we were looking at Subarus. We’d pretty much settled on the Green… except they didn’t have a Green with the options we wanted on site. They did have an Indigo, so we went for that.

The sales guy went over to the auxiliary lot to get the car. When he brought it back, before he showed us anything else, he walked us around to the side to show us the spot where he’d rubbed the dust off. It was the first one we’d looked at while browsing colors.

Then, he told me to look at the odometer.

Yeah, I guess that counts as very new! They hadn’t even pulled the plastic wrapping from the seats and so forth!

So while they detailed the car, we had to go sign all the rest of the paperwork, then pull all of our stuff out of the Focus. I was a teensy bit surprised at how ready I was to walk away from the Focus. But only a teensy.

They showed us how a lot of things on the new car worked, including programming to voice phone activation and such. We rushed him a bit, because it was after 5, and we were expecting people to show up at the house real soon now!

We got back to the house about 20 til 6. Jeff and Jeri Lynn showed up shortly thereafter. At 6, which was when we had originally planned to start walking to the theatre, there was no sign of Mark and Chuck, so I called. They arrived (with Tom) right at 6:15. We did manage to get through the box office line and inside before the movie started, but only barely. Darrel, Chip, and Eli were already inside, and the theatre was crowded enough that we all ended up in slightly separated seats.

I enjoyed the movie just as much the second time as we had last weekend. Everyone else seemed to like it, too.

But I should do a separate post about that, since there are pictures from the pizza parlor to upload.

Later. It’s after my bedtime…