Daisy (not her real name)

You are what you drive, or so it seems around here. And there’s no shortage of extremely expensive cars about. There’s a local Ferarri dealer just across from the Tesla dealer, just along from Maserati to name just a few ways to liberate your money. Mercedes and BMW have research labs here too. You get the idea.

So we had previously set off on day one in our two rental cars, a small run-around (approximately a Japanese version of a Trabant) and the “carry all our stuff” SUV. The SUV option was magically upgraded because they didn’t have the size we wanted which meant we had an embarrassingly large wagon by the name of Truckasaurus. Not only did Truckasaurus take 200 litres of “gas” to fill, but also a quart of engine oil and three Nissan sedans. The first car I have driven where the dashboard has a horizon!

The idea of the rentals was to bridge us over until we purchased our own. So after about a week we set about researching on the Internets. We ended up taking a nice Acura for a test drive, we were hooked. It was big enough for weekend family mountain bike adventures but still drives like a modest car. We picked out a tidy used two-year old model, but when it came time for money changing the weird financial situation meant that the price of a brand new one was a few $k less than second hand! So that was a fun experience, first time I’ve bought a car that was parked on carpet. We needed to wait a few days for money to transfer etc, so enter stage left the car-yard loaner, aka the plodding purple people eater. “Not our best work” said the car salesman as we surfed off to hand back one of our rentals.

We also got a nice little run-around for shuttling kids, groceries etc. This allowed us a final visit to the rental car people to leave truckasaurus blowing smoke rings in their parking lot. So we are now a two-car family. In our previous NZ life we were proud to own and only need one car. This has led to a new problem in that we need to name them as you can’t refer to “the car” anymore without the ensuing descriptions etc. They are both blue btw. I’m sure they will reveal their quirks soon enough, and will name themselves.

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