Our New Odyssey

This time, it's a new set of wheels for the Rowes. Poor Devon spent 6.5 hours at the dealership on Sunday, trading in the Pilot (sob, sob), and buying us a more practical vehicle -- a 2007 Honda Odyssey minivan. He was a real trooper, and even though it was him at the dealership, I felt like even I had just bought a new car by the end of the night -- very stressful! I told him I trusted him fully, but he still called frequently to talk about things (which is a good thing). When I met the salesman & the finance guy later, they both mentioned that Devon was no pushover, more or less. He bought one of the super sale Odysseys; they list the stock number in the paper, and you have to bring the ad in to get that price (he had to go across the street to buy a paper to find the ad, I'm not sure how it slipped about actually needing the ad when you go in, but apparently it was the salesman that mentioned it). He thinks it had been sitting on the lot for awhile (3-4 months) because of the color: Slate Green. Seriously, there's not a speck of green in it, but that's what they call it. It was worth it for ~$6000 less, and even if it turns green, that's okay, I like that color anyway.

We never imagined ourselves as minivan kinda people, but I was reaching my limit of horking Jordan in and out of the Pilot, into a car seat that wasn't properly installed if Devon is driving (the seat back pushed it upward), and then add in the wheelchair. Enough was enough. Once again, practicality wins out. I feel like I'm driving a bus when I start to back up somewhere.

That said, it is pretty amazing. Life is already easier. There's tons of space, the doors open with the press of a button, the seats can be moved around into many different configurations, there's a pretty big trunk, and, Jordan's car seat fits anywhere. I'm going to try out a few different configurations to see which one will work best, but I think I know already. And, if we need to, it can be converted to wheelchair accessible van down the road (those are nice, but conversion is very expensive, ~$20k, so we'll jump that hurdle when we get there).

I took Avery back to the dealership last night to sign my part of the papers, and she LOVED it. In fact, she played in it today a couple of times (for ~10 minutes at a time), and told me she wants to move into it. When we got to the dealership last night we walked past a fancy red sports car with "no lid" (convertible), and I asked her if we should get that one instead -- NO!!! We dropped by Kelly & Kate's house, and on the way home Avery said "wouldn't it be really, really, really cool if we had two car seats just like this one, and then Kate could ride in our new car, too." [Kate's been sick for ~2 weeks, so they are having serious withdrawals from each other -- luckily she's on the mend, and maybe by Wednesday we'll be able to hit the park together].

I guess this makes us a Honda family. We did give the Toyota Sienna a try, but we got pretty crappy customer service, and when Devon sat in the spiffy new 2007 Sienna, he thought the seat was broken. Turns out, like in all other Toyotas, Devon just doesn't "fit" in their seats. No way we're buying a new car that Devon is uncomfortable in, so back to the Honda dealership we went.