New, and Slightly Mad

So the big news of the day is: we have a new car! Why? Because we are planning to drive to Sydney (departing this Friday), and only found out last Friday that our old car’s transmission is on its last legs. Talk about putting the pressure on… To fix the transmission would have cost as much as the value of the car, and we’ve been talking about getting a new car for a while now, so luckily we had some car models in mind.

David put in a Herculean effort over the last four days and says, “I would rather get my skull drilled open than go through this again, but it looks like we have a car.” Yay! (Not only that, he got them to accept our old car, which would have been a pain to get rid of, so, YAY again!) At 4:30, after a whole day of teeth-grinding negotiations (about road-worthiness) and driving back and forth across Brisbane (to see the car & get it checked out), the seller really flabbergasted us by reneging on the sale. David even asked me to check with the Office of Fair Trading to see if we had any recourse. But later, after David called them to see if they *really* meant to pull out, they said they were going ahead with the sale (phew!) Now our fingers are crossed that they deliver as promised and we get a road-worthy car tomorrow.

And a big thank you goes out to our mechanic who really helped us with advice on whether the model we liked was sound, and squeezed us into his busy schedule at short notice to inspect the car we picked.