new car shopping

We have been awfully busy lately, and while I should have something like 72 pictures posted by now, I've only got 19. So I'm going to attempt to rectify both my lack of posts and my lack of pictures today - I'm not going to get completely caught up, but I'm gonna give it a good shot.

So after our recent misadventures with The Grey Baron, we decided it was time to get rid of him. We figured he probably wasn't worth fixing up, since a) he's 16 and a half years old, 2) he's got a ton of stuff wrong with him, iii) he'd probably just get stolen again (I mean, if they broke into him twice...), and d) Johnny has never liked him all that much, and he's the one who has to drive him. Plus, Johnny has never had a nice shiny new car, and we can (just barely) afford to get him one now. So. We asked Mom to mail us the title so we could trade The Grey Baron in, and we went looking for some new wheels...

We went here:

Lauderdale MINI, 1440 S. Federal Hwy, Ft. Lauderdale. We sort of half-heartedly planned to go check out the Honda Civics and Accords, too, but we never made it to the Honda dealership. :)


Just look at all the cute little babies!!


They've made a lot of changes to these cars since I got Lucy in 2002. We met our nice salesman, an older gentleman named Jim, and he showed us the new cars and took us on a test drive. He used to sell BMWs, and he told us how impressed he is by how much people really love their MINIs (like I need to be told - ha!). I thought he was very nice, until he jokingly suggested I might want to trade Lucy in so I could get a new MINI, too. No chance, car-man!!! I'm keeping her 'til her engine falls out.

But getting back to Johnny's car... the car he really wanted was green with the premium package (which has the multi-function steering wheel and the sunroof), but they didn't have one of those available and he didn't want to wait for them to custom-build one. He flipped through their book of available incoming models, and settled on a little guy in Astro Black (his second choice color) with the premium package and also a few features from the sport package and the convenience package. Those extras upped the price a bit, but not too much. This car was still on a boat, though, so we'd have to wait a couple weeks before we could see him. But that was ok, since that gave us time to arrange financing and insurance and all that mess.

It was finally time to bid farewell to The Grey Baron.