The Mom Van

It's official. I am now the proud owner of a minivan. Yikes! But here's a secret that I have sort of refused to admit. I am in love with this van. It has power sliding doors. The kids can get in so easily, and we even have room for the...yes, I'm admitting this...little kid potty chair. Hah! I really am a Mom :). I am so glad we bought a van. So here is the story of the van.

We couldn't find a good deal on a van in  Medford. So we looked all over Oregon. We wanted a Honda Odyssey or a Toyota Sienna. But the Toyota's seemed to be just a little over our budget. So we chose the Honda. Our good friends Matt and Cindy Borror volunteered to watch our kids for the entire day so we could go look at vans in Portland. We had been following a few on craigslist that looked like a pretty good deal. (I'm not really into buying new...I mean really, the kids are going to throw up in this thing...why would I buy NEW?) Anyways, we drove the 4.5 hour trip to Portland, looked at a small dealer on 82nd street and left without turning back. It was horrible. HORRIBLE! Do not look for a car on 82nd street in Portland. We then headed to the the dealer with the van we were really interested in. It was much better. And they guessed we went to 82nd street first by our stories from that day. The van was still available. After test driving it once we weren't sure. The dealer was so nice. He let us use his office to talk it through alone and pray. He then let us test drive it again. We decided to go for it. I think our initial uncertainty was more of a shock that we were actually buying a van. The dealer took FOREVER to fill out paperwork so we didn't actually get out of Portland until around 6:30 PM. And we still had at least a 4 hour drive back to Medford. It was a long day. And I'm so grateful for our friends that volunteered to watch the kids. It would have been a nightmare on 82nd street with the kids.

It looks like we will probably be keeping our Jeep for Matt now. We plan to sell his little Dodge Status here soon. But Matt's going to drive the Jeep to work this week to see what kind of gas mileage it gets for him. His current Dodge only needs filled up once a month. :)

Oh, and the van is a 2002 :). I know...it's like 10 years old! Gasp!!! But I'm not worried at all. It's a Honda! And we take really good care of our cars. Besides, we didn't get rid of Matt's old Honda until it was over 20 years old! Nice...

Here are the pics.