Our old van finally reached the terminal stage of its life a couple weeks back. It was still running but needed a lot of repairs. After the engine incident over the summer, the repair bill was adding up to be more than new car payments per year. Mom and I had been thinking about getting a van for a while, but we had been waiting as long as the old van was still operational.
We looked at several vans and eventually I wore Mom down and we got the decked out Toyota Sienna. It had side windows that roll down! That’s cool. It also has a DVD player built in, which was a built of a drawback. Corwin was very excited by it, although we did get him to agree that he could only use it on “long” trips. As a result, when Mom asked him later if he wanted to attend a musical event, his first question was “how far away is it?”.
We bought the van on Monday. We had take it in a couple of times for various protection gimmicks the salesmen conned us in to. We’ll see if it makes a difference, although Corwin has already started leaving empty Diet Coke cans and empty cups of cappucino in it (it must be Corwin - Charles doesn’t have any money to buy such things).
Beyond the DVD, Corwin’s favorite feature has been the sun shades in the back. I don’t expect them to last too long. Mom and my favorite feature is that we don’t worry about some sort of catastrophic mechanical failure every time we drive. I also like the two side doors, which makes moving the poopers in and out much easier. Charles and Alice were indifferent about the whole thing.
We had been using Mom’s WRX as the main family vehicle because it was just too annoying to use the old van. But we’ve switched over to the new van as the main family vehicle. Alice made a difference, because getting three kids in the back of the WRX was getting a bit crowded. Now Corwin gets the whole back seat to himself and he can sit anywhere on it he wants. That was tremendously exciting to him. Corwin likes the van so much that he hasn’t even complained that it’s not red.