Our new baby

Baby blue van, that is. It is a 2006 Toyota Sienna with 30K miles... we found it at a dealership where it had been sitting waiting for a loving family to adopt it so long that the dealer was tired of looking at it. So he sold it to us for a pretty good deal! We actually got it for $3000 under blue book value, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. We're pretty excited! We have already used it to haul an oversized box home from the store, and it is so liberating! I find myself trolling around craigslist looking at all sorts of kid toys thinking, "I could fit that in my van... I could fit THAT in my van... I could fit BOTH of those in my van..." Haha, I better control myself.

I just realized I haven't chronicled the whole stratus saga, and I'm not going to because it is so long. But, the reader's digest version is that it was doing fine on our drive out here from Cleveland until day 3 when Mike checked the oil and it was like dangerously low. The day before it had been fine. Then he noticed oil slung up all over the place under the car. We topped it off, and kept going. It was fine until the last day, when about halfway through our drive from Dallas to El Paso the oil was looking low again. We topped it off, made it here, and parked it on the street where it has proceeded to make a nice big oil stain. Actually, since we got here it has ceased to leak like crazy, and is back to its normal slow drip. So that was good, but also causing grief was the A/C, which has a leak somewhere in the system. A re-charge lasts about a week, and then it is gone. Two mechanics have been unable to diagnose the location of the leak, and the best they can guess is that it is something in the evaporator.

We tried out a cheap fix with a mechanic in our ward here just to see if that would solve things, and it didn't... so after going back and forth for a few days about what to do we said: Screw it! We're done with this car. We actually are making money now, and instead of dumping enough money to cover 3 car payments into this old hunk of junk to get it operable (because A/C is kind of important in the summer in El Paso), we could actually make 3 car payments on a new car. We wanted one in the next year anyway, and so we went for it! We are very glad now, and it is a relief not to have car problems with the stratus looming over our heads, or just worrying when the next one will strike. So we have it listed on craigslist for a few hundred under bluebook value, and if it doesn't get any takers in the next few weeks, we're thinking we'll just donate it to a charity and take the tax write-off.