A NEW CAR!

The Price is Right just doesn't have the same excitement behind it as it used to, say what you want about Bob Barker, but for some reason, the crowd was always whipped up into a frenzy when he was on...

We bought a van this week. It's a 2006 GMC Savana 3500, which means it's new to us.
It's a 15 passenger van, or it was until I took the back seat out. Now it's an 11 passenger van with a really big cargo space in the back.

We found the thing on an auto auction lot, there aren't a lot of used vans for sale around here in size we were looking for. This one was a pretty good deal. I found it late Tuesday afternoon, Tara and I went back up Wednesday to drive it around. Wednesday night was the auction places night to do their little thing, so we kind of bought the van in a hurry to avoid losing it in the auction. (There were some vans in Salt Lake at some dealerships, but they were a bit more.)

The van has a rubberized floor, which is not really a bad thing with our kids. One of them spilled water all over it on Thursday. We now have plenty of space for them to spread out, and as an added bonus, the thing is long enough that putting Mary and Emma on the last bench kind of dampers the noise. It has a few dings and stuff, but seems to run well. It's got tinted windows, and rear heat/AC. It has 67,000 miles, but I don't think that's all that bad, since the thing is only 2 years old. That means the place that owned it before drove it a lot. (As opposed to aways having problems with it and having it in the shop all the time...) I talked with the motor pool guy at work, he had vans to surplus, but no vans to replace them because of a auto worker strike in Ohio. We could have gotten a van from them, it would have had about the same number of miles, but a few years older.I think we did ok with this one.

Anyway, now we can all fit in the same car after the baby is born, and we have room again for road trips...