My Car is HOME!

I can hardly believe it. After one last test drive and a couple of hours worth of paperwork at the dealer, I got to drive my beautiful new car home tonight! Yes, I will get some pictures in the next couple of days. I might actually include myself in them, for once. 😉 I didn’t even have the checkbook with me because we didn’t know what we were going to do about a possible trade-in on my car. The salesperson was very honest with us, though, and said that for as great a car as he imagines my old Grand Am is (less than 45K miles on a 10+ year old car in excellent condition; it’s a cream puff!), he thinks we’d be much better off selling it privately because we’ll get more money for it in a private sale. So, I thought we would be going back tomorrow for it, until the finance manager mentioned that they could take a credit card for the down payment. Well, there’s only one of my cards that I was sure had a big enough limit to handle it (they’re all at $0, but I don’t know the limits on the older cards), which was my Disney Visa, so we’ll be on the way to earning some credits for our next Disney vacation. I’ve put in the transfer order to move some of the money out of our ING savings account into my checking and then I’ll pay the credit card off as soon as the money transfers and the amount hits the card. It should all be a done deal within a couple of days and then I can breathe a sigh of relief, as I want to make sure I don’t pay any sort of interest. 🙂

In the meantime, Terry is having lots of fun playing with the navigation unit and reading the manuals. I just wanted to drive it. The rest will come in time. You have no idea how important it is for me to feel comfortable driving again. I don’t like driving Terry’s SUV because it’s so large and it’s hard for me to know where the ends of the car are and it maneuvers like a tank. So, it’s been an ugly combination for a little while. I don’t like to drive the truck, but we carpool and inevitably, I have a meeting in another building from time to time that requires transportation, so Terry drops me off and then I have to call him to come and retrieve me when I’m done. It feels (and probably looks) unprofessional to me, so I am highly, HIGHLY relieved to no longer require a chauffeur. The excellent gas mileage that the car gets may have been the driving (sorry for the pun) factor behind the purchase, but regaining my independence and professionalism means a lot more to me. I will no longer look like the mousy female who can’t drive herself anywhere.

Of course, we have a radar detector ready to go into it and we will NEED it. This car rides so smoothly that I was going 60 MPH without even realizing it on the way home! COP BAIT! 😈 Of course, we have to go back to the dealership tomorrow to redo the financing paperwork because the finance manager received some information from Honda just after we drove off the lot that will reduce our monthly payments slightly. And we may be back on Friday to drop the car off to have the accessories installed that we still need (fog lights, bass speakers and a day/night mirror with compass). Fortunately, they offer a shuttle service, so we’ll be able to drop off the car, they’ll drive us to work and then come back and pick us up later. It seems that we’ll be very friendly with the dealer for just a little bit longer…