The last few months we have had some real adventures car-wise. Our loyal but very old Saxo finally had to go in October, when practically nothing worked on it anymore. We had been debating what to do about it as we got closer to the MOT date, but when we prayed about it and the same day we noticed it veering to the left, the knocking and squeaking getting louder and the brake lights not working (!) we decided it had to go. We parted with it at a scrap heap, got £140 and walked away.
Of course now we had to find a new car... but we didn't have a car to find one! (How come we didn't think of that before we got rid of it?) We had quite a tight criteria- diesel, very economical, small preferably, low tax band, low insurance group, full service history, cambelt change, under £2500 and less than an hour or two away. We had to rely on Ben's parents driving us to garages up and down the country when we were all free, which wasn't very often. Often we'd find one, but by the time we'd been able to work out the logistics of being able to see it it was long gone. Then there was the car we found on autotrader that looked absolutely perfect so Ben went up to Birmingham to see it and hopefully pick it up. When he got to the address it turned out to be a car park in the middle of dodgy estate rather than a house, and the address the car was registered to was hundreds of miles away! Hmm, stolen vehicle?! Another fun trip was going to see the slimey dealer who couldn't start the car for a while, and when he did get it running we saw that the "full service history" advertised was actually all written in the same handwriting despite it being done at other garages...!! After three or four weeks of searching we finally got lucky and picked up a lovely little Vauxhall Corsa. It was nippy, a good price, economical and wonderful to drive.
On 21st December it turned out it was also wonderful to drive INTO, when a taxi driver hit us while we were stationary and about to turn into our drive. Oliver was just two weeks old and miraculously no-one was hurt. Needless to say, the car was declared a write-off and we were back to square one again!
Amazingly the insurance company valued the Corsa at £675 more than we paid for it (it really WAS a good deal!) so we could now up our price and hopefully find something better! We were also given a very snazzy hire car for six weeks, so we could start the finding process again (oh joy!7s usually a reason why people get rid of the car- and in our experience it's usually because things are going wrong...
- Sometimes you can check everything, be very picky and think you've finally got it sussed, and it's still not right.
Well, we still haven't learnt how to do it properly, but one day we'll get it right, I'm sure?! It's all quite funny really :)
