Vrrroooommmmm

I finally dove in head first and bought a new car. Since being rear-ended by the school bus earlier this year and getting a rental car while my Toyota Echo was in the shop, I've been thinking about and researching a lot of options for a new vehicle. I've had my Echo for nearly 10 years now, and it's been (and still is) a fantastic car. We'll probably end up selling it, but we're toying around with the idea of just keeping it around as the vehicle we use to do more messy things like hardware trips, hauling stuff around, taking to places where we don't care if it gets banged up a bit or dirty.

After my research and mulling over options for the last several months, I picked the MINI Cooper S Clubman, and ordered a 2011 model. Last week, when my friend T. came for a visit, she handed over the driver's seat in her awesome MINI Cooper S and let me give it a whirl. I was instantly in love with the look, feel, and handling of her car and became quite serious about it as a possibility. This last week, I was busy on the Internet and hitting T. up with questions, and yesterday L. and I we went for a test drive of the Clubman model at Seattle MINI. Though I love everything about T.'s Cooper S, I felt that for our lifestyle having the club door on the Clubman would be helpful with getting our precious cargo, Oli, in and out of the backseat for trips to the groomer and visits with his doggy friends. I also liked that it had just a bit more room in the back, so we ultimately went with the Clubman.

I'm busy thinking of names for it now, and will be united with my car roughly around Thanksgiving if all goes according to plan with the manufacturing. I have to say that being able to custom order so many things on the car is amazingly fun. There was a little confusion with the customizing process since they are just lining up the options for the 2011 models and a couple of the things it looked like you could select on their configuration site weren't really options for the car when we went into the dealer. But those were very small details in an otherwise very flexible process, and I was happy to adjust a bit. L. was thankfully pretty quiet through it all and let me just ride with the process. We have very different strategies to buying cars, so it was nice to have him return the favor for me this time as I had done when we looked for his Audi a few years ago.

There's still a part of me that's pretty amazed I'm doing this, but the cost for the car came out right about the same as the Mazda, Honda, Toyota, Kia, and other crossover vehicles I was considering, and my MINI is designed by me! Plus, it has the backing of BMW, so how can you go wrong with that? And it's a total icon in the auto industry. So, it gets the gold star for those things. Plus, the feeling of driving a MINI is just so much fun. I couldn't help but smile the whole time we were at the dealership.