Goodbye, Emmy and Pendergast! We'll miss you!

Until today, Gavin has been cruising around town in Jeff's orange Honda Element (named Pendergast). However, today he has new wheels! Now that I'm working from home full-time, I've hardly driven my little Honda Civic (named Emmy) since moving to North Carolina. Whenever we're out, we always take Pendergast since it's a tight squeeze to fit any adult passengers in Emmy when the car seat is installed. Regretfully, I've never learned to drive the Pendergast. Despite taking several lessons about manual transmissions with Jeff over a year ago, I didn't stick with it and now there's no way I'm going to learn how to drive one on these hilly Raleigh roads! That means Jeff is the only person who can drive Pendergast while Emmy sits and sobs as she gets left behind again and again every time we run an errand.

So, we decided to consolidate and trade in both vehicles for one that we can both drive and sit comfortably in. We just don't need two vehicles anymore but neither of the Hondas would work as our sole vehicle. We initially thought the Honda CR-V was our primo top choice, but after visiting the Honda and Toyota dealerships over the weekend, we decided that the Toyota Rav4 better fit our needs. Yesterday, Jeff cleaned both of our cars inside and out so they'd get top dollar at trade-in (it seemed to work - we got Kelley Blue Book or higher for both).

Today, we sealed the deal and said "goobye" to our Hondas which we each adore so much. Seriously, I would have been crying as we left the lot in our new vehicle had Jeff not been there to make fun of me! I love that little car so much and had been looking forward to keeping her until Gavin started driving! I could go on and on about her six years of reliability and the legendary 40-miles-per-gallon tank of gas she got on a road trip last summer, but I'll refrain from singing her praises too much for fear I'll break down and won't be able to finish this blog entry ;).

Hello, Puddy!

We chose red for the new Rav4, a nice deep, sophisticated red. It's Gavin's favorite color. And, we've chosen the name Puddy... because he spends most of his time in the parking lot just staring and squinting. Gavin doesn't see the big deal about the new vehicle, though. His seat doesn't feel any different, after all!