joys of car shopping

Shopping can be fun if it's just a casual day out to the mall to look around. But more often than not, I find shopping stressful- especially when I'm supposed to have something by a certain time and then I have to rush to get it. Then there's the one type of shopping that is an exquisite waste of time, and that extra special one is car shopping. Car shopping can be fun if you can drive, or if you're getting a new car just for yourself, or if you know anything about cars at all. Unfortunately, I fit into zero of those categories, but I tagged along anyway with my family as we sought to find a new car for my brother. 

Minivan in the snow!

​It all started with my mom's minivan. She has a 2005 Honda Odyssey which I've pretty much grown up with. People really don't give minivans enough credit; they're comfortable and spacious, while also being able to endure anything you throw at them, and they last a long time. Over the past few years, our beloved minivan has had some increasingly troublesome issues which led us to the thought of buying a new car. However, we always ended up repairing whatever was causing the problem because the Honda is too good to let go.

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It's funny how attached you can get to an inanimate object. There are stickers on the window of the Honda that I put there as a little one, and they've just never come off. We've taken a trip to Canada, to our relatives' house, and driven all over the place in that car. It holds an almost unhealthy amount of sentimental weight for me. I think in some ways the Honda reflects how much I've grown in my life because we've owned it since my early childhood, and getting rid of it would symbolize the ending of all that. Or it could just be that it's a nice car, I don't know. But a few days ago, while my mom was driving into a parking garage, it just stopped working. This, for my parents, was the last straw. We were going to get a new car.

Trips in the Honda!

​And so, in the span of one day, we set out to find a car for my mom. We were going to buy one right then and there whenever we found the car that we wanted. After spending a few hours going to two dealerships and test driving two cars that were both pretty nice, we, of course, did not buy anything. It was pretty boring- usually I at least get to enjoy the snacks at the dealerships, but they didn't have any good ones here. The Honda ended up back with us after we decided to just fix it and bring it back (yay!), but now we still had to get a car for my brother, because he has to commute between two buildings for school next year and we weren't about to buy a car for both my mom and my brother at the same time. 

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Sally in Cars.

After another round of going to dealerships and eating no-good dealership snacks and watching my family test drive cars, we settled on a Subaru for my brother. The color that we're getting reminds me of Sally in the Cars movies: a light, sky blue, and that was probably the most interesting part of the car for me, although I actually love Subaru commercials. 

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Favorite Subaru commercial!

They're so loving and sweet, and really capture how a car can make such a difference in a family. They remind me of my attachment to our Odyssey, so I suppose that because Subaru advertisements understand that, I already had a good impression of them. My favorite commercial of theirs is one of a dad giving his adult daughter the keys to the car, but as a father, he sees it as giving his little toddler daughter the keys to the car. It's extremely sentimental for an ad of a vehicle, but I like it a lot more than the ones where the car ads where they go racing dangerously all over the place just to look cool. ​The meaningful things always stick better.

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Car we ended up getting!

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Happy Driving!
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