Stimulating the Economy

We're doing our part to get the economy back on track - this afternoon we bought a minivan! It's a 2009 Volkswagen Routan SE in Antigua Blue. I think they threw some more acronyms at us, but that's about all I remember. I have mixed feelings. Part of me is pretty excited about buying a new car, and it's a pretty nice one. But at the same time, that's one more giant step towards being a soccer mom, and I always swore I'd never get a minivan. But that ship has sailed, so I guess I'll have to just focus on being excited about all that we're getting. Although I am sad to have traded in D'Artagnan. He was a good little car.



The van is definitely a lot swankier than D'Artagnan was, though. We were excited about the basics that come standard on just about everything anymore - power windows and locks, cruise control, LATCH system, that kind of thing. But we got so much more than that too. Adam's particularly excited about the auto-dimming rearview mirror. His old car had that, and he's missed it since we've started doing all of our traveling at night. Another cool feature, although I don't know how much we'll actually use it, is that the third row of seats rotates 180 degrees to face out the back for tailgating or a drive-in or something like that.

Here's the auto-dimming rearview mirror that's made Adam so happy:


We ended up getting a few things that we didn't necessarily want since they were in the one that the dealer had. So we now have the ability to play not one, but two DVDs (can't expect the kids in the 2nd and 3rd rows to watch the same thing), a hard drive to store our music so that we don't have to bring CDs in and out of the car, a touchscreen radio, satellite radio, a sunroof, a power lift rear gate, remote start, automatic doors (can't expect the kids to close a door), an engine block heater (useful if we ever move to Minnesota), all sorts of swanky things.

The next trick was to make sure that it fit in the garage. Surprisingly, it's a tighter fit lengthwise than heightwise, but we were able to get it in this evening, even with all of the other stuff we have stored in there from our myriad on-going house projects. I think Adam's a little worried about me running it into the wall, though. He mentioned hanging up a string or something where we should stop the front of the car to make it fit in there.