One Hell of a Shopping Spree
I've been driving my parents' minivan since I moved to North Carolina. I had a car before I moved here, but it wouldn't have made it all the way to North Carolina from Wisconsin. I wasn't sure it would have made it from the part of Wisconsin in which I lived to any other part of Wisconsin. It had Car Cancer or something. Anyway, I sold it for $200 and bought a plane ticket to NC.
This was a year and a half ago, and though I'm grateful that my parents had a spare car for me to drive, a couple of problems were starting to rear their ugly little heads.
1. I'm twenty-five years old, and I was starting to get a little tired of always being mistaken for a soccer mom and always being immediately volunteered to help people move things, and
2. My parents wanted their van back.
So I started looking at cars late last week. I had a decent down payment, but I figured it would take a while for anything to happen. There was no harm in putting my feelers out there, right?
Putting my feelers out last Wednesday resulted in me signing on the dotted line for a 2005 Chevy Malibu this afternoon.
I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop, but in the meantime, I'm pretty much thrilled that I (a) found and financed a car all by myself with no cosigners or anything, and (b) am now driving a car that's less than fifteen years old!
I really, really, really love to drive it. I've never been a big driver. I don't really get why some people get excited about cars. And while I'm not saying a Chevy Malibu is anything to go nuts over, it's shiny and silver and has heated seats and a sunroof and it's quiet on the inside AND the outside, and I really like driving it.
Of course now I'm painfully aware of just how many cars there are on the road. It's like buying a car has awakened some kind of spider sense that makes me paranoid somebody's going to scrape my baby during a poorly-executed left turn.
Anyway. That's what I did today. And even though I don't have any regrets, dropping that much money and signing that many contracts gave me a stomachache. Pictures when I recover.