What I have not mentioned on this blog until now is that, a little over 2 weeks ago, I was in a car wreck with my children. We were driving home from the city pool with a few slabs of ribs as a treat for Kitt, when another car came out of a side road way too soon — or too late, depending on how you look at it. Any road, though I tried to swerve around her, there wasn’t a chance of pulling it off.
Her car, of course, had only damage to the left front quarter-panel and the associated wheel. Ours, of course — a lovely 2005 Ford Focus wagon we’d just purchased used about 2 years ago — was toastier than bread in a broiler. The good news is that the belts and air bags did their job; otherwise, of course, I would not be here writing these words now. I was the only one in our car that took any real damage, and that was mostly bruising from a rather large person hitting locked seat belts. (That’s mostly gone, aside from some good hematomas around my right arm that are taking their time to fade and reabsorb. But man, did I have some fantastic bruises for a while!)
That put us in the market for a replacement car, and Kitt went right to work on that. She’s the more consumer-knowledge oriented when it comes to capital purchases, I’ll freely admit, and she tracked down the best possibilities, as well as did spare-time shopping on a pair of Sundays while I was at work. We rejected the Dodge Caliber wagon right off; it did not have enough room in back, no decent takeoff from a stop/park — it felt like a driver unfamiliar with standard transmissions was hunting for first gear — and the sight lines around the windshield pillars were just wrong. I was given a Caliber as a rental car by the other driver’s insurance company for 5 days, and I also discovered that it ate gas way too much for the driving style we have to practice in this rural area.
But Kitt had located another 2005 Focus wagon in Atlanta on the Internet, and it was owned by CarMax. These folks are a pleasure to deal with, or at least the rep we had here in Hoover was quite good. He didn’t know as much about the vehicles he was selling as I would like, but he was supportive, and let us drive what we wanted to try out as much as we wanted. When we settled on the Focus — this time in Harper blue instead of silver! — CarMax shipped it to Hoover free, and we went over it well and truly. The end of the story is that, like Paddy said when he bought the pig, it was a done deal. And at an interest rate half of what we were paying Ford Credit for the other car as well. Throw in a 30-day fix-it guarantee, an 18,000-mile extended warranty that we purchased for a good rate (we won’t make it to 18 months, I can promise you that [grin]), and a good experience overall, and we came away from the purchase quite pleased.
If you’re in the market for a used car, you can do much worse than try out CarMax. Give them a shot; you might be pleasantly pleased.
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Peace be to you.
