New addition to the family..

No it isn't what you are thinking :-D. I thought I'll drag it out a bit, but in the time that I have to write the post, I cannot afford to drag stuff these days :-\. Still, you know I'll try my best :-D.

The story goes like this. I have been hearing about how good the kids programs are in the libraries here. So about a month ago, after getting all the details from the library, I headed to the nearest branch with Snugli for toddler story-time. She really loved it and had the time of her life (more about Snugli and story-time in my next post :-D). They have a preschooler story time on another day, so I thought I would take her to the library to both the hours (which meant twice a week). But there was an unanticipated problem.

We had only one vehicle. In bigger cities you have good public transportation, but thats not the case in our small town. There is only one bus route thats near to us (about 10 min walk) and it goes nowhere near the library. At first we thought we could manage with the SUV we have. But we were wrong :-p. The timing of this story-time sessions are such that its in the middle of nowhere for us, namely at 10:30 AM, so Sri can neither drop us when he is going nor pick us up when he's back home for lunch. We tried a couple of things; me dropping him to office in the morning going to library with Snugli, coming back home and then go pick Sri again. Didn't work; Also Sri going to office in the morning, coming back at around 10AM to pick us up. We dropping him off at his office, heading to library and then later picking him up when we drive back home. He again going to office and coming back for lunch. Phew! As you can see it was a bit tedious and multiple trips can take the excitement out of anything (atleast for us if not for Snugli :-D).

So we thought about it and decided to get another car - a second hand one. I did suggest a 2-wheeler (they are getting to be quite common these days), but it doesn't really make sense in winters here. Now that Snugli is growing up, I am planning to put her to some kind of classes soon and she'll have to attend them in winter too ;-). So we had to opt for a car. After about a month of research later, here we are. We zoomed in on a 2003 Toyota Camry last week, got the registration done last Wednesday (March 31st) and brought the car home.

So here's our new (well, old :-p) car. Its fourth-hand and older than our SUV, but it doesn't really look its age :-D.




Compare and contrast with our SUV..




Its actually a kind of Grey..




But looks almost the same colour of our SUV..




Its my first car ;-), though I have to say that I am not really jumping up and down with excitement (I did that when we bought the SUV, so feel kinda jaded :-p). Its officially my car, but since I am the one toting around Snugli everywhere, Sri takes the Camry to office and the SUV is all mine (unofficially ofcourse ;-) :-D) muahahahaa >:-).

Sriram's new love :)

He had been looking for the one for a long time. He had searched and searched. He had researched, looked at all positives and negatives, the advantages and the disadvantages. He had asked for advice from some knowledgable ones and also referred to other available knowledge databases. And finally had zeroed in on the one. But there never seemed an auspicious moment for the one to actually arrive in his life. The auspicious moment was because of the cost factor associated :-p.

Does the above paragraph look familiar? Thats because I copied and pasted it straight from my "A new love of my life ;-)" post with only changes being from "I" to "He" and from "my" to "his". Why? Because it applies aptly. The new love of my life then was our camera and the new love of Sri's life now is our brand new SUV :). Though Sri has owned a couple of cars before, they have all been 2nd hands and the old Nissan sentra we have now is actually 3rd hand!! So this is our (as well as his) first new car (well, Sri hates it if I refer to the SUV as car, as its obviously bigger and sleeker :-D).

Car shopping in general is an experience in the US (probably anywhere for that matter :-p). And my hubby is a research freak which is definitely a good thing when it comes to car shopping as such. He had been researching for months before zeroing in on the Toyota Highlander.

One major rule in buying a car is that you wait until almost the end of the year to buy the current year's model. So the next year's model will already be in the market and hence you get discounts on the current year one. It helped that the 2007 Toyota highlander was in no way different from the 2006 one. No major improvements. Now that decided, we only had to look out for a deal. Thanksgiving weekend is always a great time for deals. Since last week was Thanksgiving, it all started then.

Now car-buying can be pretty tricky. There are some hidden discounts that the customer can actually get, but if he/she has no knownledge of the same, then the dealer may not actually give the discount. In short, you have to ask for it to get it :-\. Not only that, the dealer agent can be extremely pushy and can actually manage to push something onto you which was probably not the thing you wanted. So Sri warned me multiple times on how to make some negative comments, so that we get exactly what we want :). Ok points noted. The only thing remaining was actually visiting a showroom and buying one.

The first time we went to a showroom was pretty fun. They didn't have the exact specifications of what we wanted, but they could get it from an out-of-state dealer (they don't go to the nearby dealers as its not profitable to any one of them). We could get a test drive on a higher edition (test drive is fascinating here, you can actually keep a car for overnight before you decide to buy it or not) and we made some negative comments appropriately :-p. After which came the haggling :).

Haggling for a car here is like the bargaining we do in markets (santhe) in India. Its literally "I'll take it if you give it to me for $___"!!! It was really an enjoyable experience. After about an hour of haggling, we agreed on a price and the dealer agreed to get the car for us from another state. We couldn't believe that we had booked a deal on the first visit to the showroom, 'cause its not supposed to work like that :-D.

Anyways we were looking for a black coloured one and 2 days later they called us to inform that they couldn't find a black one and they had a white one instead. So we thought of looking some more and landed in another showroom. They didn't have the exact specifications either, but the whole experience wasn't as good as the first one. It felt like they weren't really trying to bring us what we wanted.

Well, since my hubby is a total enthusiast in such things, we decided to (more like he pulled me into) driving to a nearby town called Richmond and visiting a showroom. The dealers there were even worse! They didn't have anything we wanted, they said so, didn't bother trying for anything and almost literally pushed us out :-D. Sri again managed to convince me into visiting a couple of showrooms in other towns and thats where we headed this saturday.

Meanwhile the 1st showroom dealer called us and let us know that even the white one was gone and our only option would be a 2007 model which would cost a 1000 bucks more!! And yes, I'm talking dollars! That was a considerable difference, since Sri had planned for a loan and all that. We were kind of disappointed, but hopeful of finding some other deal. So saturday morning first we headed to Frankfort. There the dealer attitude was pretty good. They didn't have any 2006 models either, so we discussed 2007 models and they didn't hesitate giving us a final figure on a 2007 model. There wasn't much haggling and we were grateful for that. We said we'd get back on that and got out.

Next we headed to Louisville to see our final 2 showrooms. But luckily the first one we visited had a 2006 model. Only it wasn't black, it wasn't white either, but metallic blue. The colour was pleasing and since I was thinking that as a second option after black, it was agreeable for both of us. Again some amount of bargaining ensued, after which a deal was finalized. While we worked out the financial details for the loan etc, the SUV was cleaned, pumped with gas (thats what they call petrol) and brought to us nice and shiny :). The whole process took about 4 hours!!

Here's our brand new SUV. The photos are taken at a different place and time as we really didn't think we would be buying a car that day and hence I forgot to take the camera with me.






After everything was over, we took the SUV to the Louiville temple and got a pooja done. I missed the camera all the more :-p. After that we had a nice 1 hour drive back home :).

It was really nice to see some sort of excitement on Sri's face after a long time. He's so calm that usually you can't make it out at all :-p :-D. Also I am so proud of Sri and glad that he was able to achieve his dream car (correction SUV :-D) at this point of our lives :). And I am grateful for the power of internet for we could show it to both our parents that day itself on webcam. Its really nice to be able to share your joy with loved ones :).