We bought a second car! We've been a one-car family for TEN YEARS, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to gripe about how inconvenient it's been, and wax poetic about how having a second car is amazing. It's going to be long. Maybe skip down to the picture of our car unless you really want to listen to me complain.
So, downsides to having just the one car:
1. It's really hard to take your car in for maintenance. Logistically you need two cars so you can drop one car off at the garage and still have a way to get home. And once your car is in the shop you have no way of getting around, which is especially true if you live in a rural area like we do. All of this leads to not taking as good of care of your car as you should, which is a kind of catch 22. Now that we have two cars, I can take our first car in for some much needed tuning up.
2. Scheduling problems. When we were first married we lived in Provo, which is very walkable, and if we drove anywhere it was usually together. Then we moved to Eugene, where Sam rode his bike to campus and I had access to the car all the time.
2.1 Commuting for work.
Then we moved to Gallatin, and transportation was a nightmare. Sam had to have the car every day to drive to work 30 minutes away. Except there were days when I also had to have the car to take Edie to the many checkups required of small babies. Which meant all of us driving up to Sam's work, dropping him off, and me driving back with Edie. Which took an hour round trip and was difficult to coordinate with Edie's feeding schedule. And then we'd do it again to pick Sam up from work. All that time and mileage and gas and sun in my eyes, all for a 30 minute doctor's appointment. Blech.
But most of the time I just stayed home. I spent 18 months unable to go anywhere and it started to get to me.
2.2 Commuting to church.
So we moved up to Portland, 3 miles from Sam's work, so he could bike to work every day (which he enjoys). The trade-off is that we now live 25 minutes from the church building, and we've both ended up in leadership positions since we've lived here. I spent three years as Primary president; we had ward council twice a month (plus a presidency meeting), there was no one to carpool with because of the Church's archaic policies about men and women breathing in the same air, and that meant Sam and Edie just had to come along for the ride and wait it out in the foyer. Except that didn't work when we switched to the early schedule (no way was I going to wake up a baby at 6:30am), so I would drive down by myself, and my sweet sainted visiting teacher would come pick up Sam and Edie and take them to church. It was a huge imposition, and once we had Marty we knew we couldn't keep it up.
Now Sam is the Elders Quorum president and he has meetings before church FOUR Sundays a month (two ward councils, one PEC, and one presidency meeting). That's right, I have to go to church an hour and a half early every Sunday for no reason. I sit in the foyer and wrangle Edie and Marty and feed them lunch while we wait for church to start. We leave at 11am for 1pm church and get home around 4:40pm. BUT NO MORE! Now I'll wrangle the kids at home, stuff them in the car, and show up to church ON TIME and no earlier. I have a lot of lost time to reclaim.
It's a 2014 C-Max SE Hybrid.
Reasons our new car is awesome:
1. It's a hybrid. I've been getting 40 MPG!
2. It has all sorts of fancy features I don't know how to use. Our Galant is from 2002 and it has neither bells nor whistles. Now I can change the radio station with a button on my steering wheel! And I can set the lights to go on and off automatically. Fancy!
3. It's a hatchback. I was looking for a station wagon type car, because I was tired of trying to stuff stuff in my trunk. Every time I went to the hardware store I had to get my lumber cut down into smaller pieces. I bought a compound miter saw and spent 20 minutes wedging the box into my trunk, and when I got home I had to cut it out of the box while it was still in the trunk to get it out. Well, no more!
4. It still looks (and smells) shiny and new. That's because I haven't let the kids ride in it yet.
5. It's quiet, partially because it's a hybrid, partially because it's just better insulated from outside noises than our other car. No more car shouting for us!
That's all. I just wanted to type this up because we waited a long time to get a second car and I want to remember what life was like before awesome futuristic hybrids entered the picture.
