NotSheep

I’m waiting for the water to heat so I can have a shower before I get ready to leave the house in order to drive a ridiculously long distance to look at a car - so I thought I’d blog while I waited.

Those who’ve been around here a long time will remember the last time we faced the need to buy a vehicle - when Henry first arrived in September 2006, and we went from being a family of seven to being a family of eight, with one seven-seater. The options were similar then:
- buy something big - like a Volkswagen Shuttle or Caravelle - which would seat eight or nine people
- buy something small, which Scratchy could use for work, leaving the current vehicle for the kids and me
- buy a second seven-seater

The problem with big is the cost - both of the purchase and the insurance. The problem with small, we decided then, was that we’d have spent our savings, and since the seven-seater we had then was already ten years old, if anything happened to it, we’d have nothing big enough even for kids-plus-one-adult. So we went for the second seven-seater option and bought a Chrysler Voyager. That turned out to be a good move, given that our old seven-seater spontaneously combusted in the driveway in August 2007. Had we gone with the small runaround option, we’d have needed to find another seven-seater in a hurry. As it was - we already had one. And we’ve managed with that one ever since. However, with another baby arriving in July, we are back to where this whole blog-post started.

So. Small runaround option discounted, I think. We could get a five-year-old nine-seater Caravelle for about £12,000 - but we’d have to source it from England so would be buying without seeing first. Or we could get another seven-seater of the same age and spend about £4,000 less. The disadvantage of the latter option is that it would still not have enough seats for all of us at once - but then, it’s not often we travel long distances all together, so does it really justify spending an extra £4,000 to be able to do so? (Not to mention that the extra cost takes us from “uses most of our savings” to “overdrawn”.)

The supply of seven-seaters here is more limited than it is elsewhere in the UK, but there’s a Grand Voyager currently advertised at a price we can manage - and we like our Voyager, and the Grand version is a bit bigger (more length, not more seats), so it might be a good buy for us. It’s a very long way away though - literally the other side of the country - but if it’s as good as it sounds, it might be worth the journey. When we bought our Peugeot 806, we also drove a ridiculously long way to look at it - mainly because geography is not my strong point and I’d arranged to view it before I figured out where it was - but it turned out to be worthwhile - it was a great car for us.

So here I go. The kids and I are staying with friends tonight; they live much, much closer to where the car is located, and it will allow me to drive there today and back tomorrow. The boys are not exactly upset about going to stay over there - in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen them washed and dressed quite so quickly. And you can expect me back here sometime tomorrow, either having agreed to buy a car, or having been disappointed in a car, or - quite possibly - still musing over cars.