Holy Hot Rod!

After almost 9 years of driving the same car (my beloved 2000 Dodge Neon), I have taken the plunge and bought a (nearly) brand new 2007 Chevrolet HHR.

With the arrival of my boy Jack "Lucky" Meredith over a year ago, my small but growing family placed a bit of a strain on our vehicle situation. My Neon and Amy's Hyundai Elantra were just not big enough. Oh, sure, we could get around town easily enough with all five of us packed in to either car, but we were packed in. Not exactly a lot of room left for the little things, like space or comfort.

On top of that, my work at the Comic Stop calls upon me to pick up shipments on a weekly basis, not to mention any trip out of town for family or business.

So, with all of that in mind, Amy and I kept an eye out for a new vehicle, preferably something not too expensive, decent gas mileage, and enough room for everyone and everything we would need it to do. Our list of requirements left us with a very short list of cars. One of these cars was the Chevy HHR.

After about a month or two of looking around, Amy found a sweet deal on a used HHR at a nearby dealership. This HRR had only 1,000 miles on it, and was a lot cheaper than other comparable HHRs we found.

After making an appointment to see and test-drive the car (which handled great), we found out the previous owner had just bought it a couple of months before. It turned that his mother suddenly turned ill and he needed a large mini-van to get her around (I believe he traded it in for a Dodge Grand Caravan). We thought about it overnight, and went back in the next day to see what kind of deal we could make. in the end, we got a new car for about $7-8,000 less than had we just bought it brand new.

Of course, the downside to this great deal is that I have car payments again...