No, not the Judith Viorst picture book. Our day actually started out pretty well. I made sourdough waffles in our new heart shaped waffle iron and topped them with fresh, organic raspberries from the Farmers Market.
Everytime I feed my sourdough starter I have to get rid of one cup of it. Instead of letting that cup go to waste I make waffles. Unfortunately our old waffle iron decided that it had had enough, so we needed a new one and I couldn’t resist the heart shaped one. The raspberries aren’t from our CSA, they were at another booth in the market and they smelled so good that I just couldn’t resist them either.
So after that lovely start to the day what went wrong? We were waiting for a ride from one of the Green Car Company employees. She was going to pick us up and drive us to Kirkland to get our new car. She called from I-5 to let us know that she was going to be late as traffic was really bad. So instead of leaving here around noon, we left around 1:00 and it took about 2 hours to get up there.
Once we were at the office things went smoothly. They had all the paperwork ready to go so that part went fast. Of course, I’ve noticed that its always fast and easy to get into debt. The car was all filled up with bio-diesel and ready to go with just one slight problem– the radio wasn’t working. They had triggered a safety mechanism and the radio thought someone was trying to steal it and had gone into safe mode. They had the code to fix it but not the tool to remove it. We need to take it into the local VW dealership to get that taken care of and they’ll just bill the Green Car Company. I wanted to go the dealership anyways to order another key as I’m sure at some point we’ll be glad to have two instead of just one.
Here’s our first ever car!
Still not horrible? Oh, it’s about to be. What mapquest said would take and hour and ten minutes took us over 3 and a half hours! Yes, the traffic really was that bad! Not only were we dealing with stop and crawl traffic but it had been years since Ryan had driven a stick and it took some getting used to. Even if we’d been in an automatic the traffic would have had us on pins and needles but in a new to us car with a stick it really was sheer torture. We passed quite a few fender benders which really stressed us out. Can you imagine telling the insurance company that we didn’t even get the car home without having an accident? We could, everytime I saw those crumpled fenders I imagined it. Thankfully we made it home in one piece. Around Tacoma Ryan started feeling much more comfortable with the car and the shifting and the cloud tension started to lift. Then just past Fort Lewis the traffic started to fade and we actually got to go fast!
The folks at the Green Car Company described the Beetle as zippy and they were right. She certainly was happy to be shifted into a higher gear and go faster. She? Okay, Ryan doesn’t believe in naming cars but I do and I christened her Dory after the fish in Finding Nemo. My mantra yesterday was “just keep on driving”. Could have used swimming too since it was raining the entire way.
When we were trying to decide if we were going to get the Beetle or not we searched the net for images of them. What we wanted to see was how much room there was. Almost all of the images were of the outside only and the official VW site seemed to think that what was important to see was the dash. Hello? I want to see the hatchback space! Well, here it is.
Dory’s hatchback with the shelf down.
Dory’s hatchback space with the shelf up. It was bigger than we had expected.
Here are the back seats, not too much leg room but Poppy Seed and McCoy don’t actually need leg room.
The front seats were pretty comfortable. The huge dash took some getting used to but it made you feel like you were in a bigger car. The only negative was the cup holders, only short cups in those holders!
I’ll add a photo of the back with the seats down soon. Ryan needed to get to work this morning so I didn’t have time to figure out how the seats fold down.
All in all, while it was a hellish day for us we’re both very glad to have the car.
The picture of Dory with hatchback open and shelf down looks like Dory has a big smile on her face! I know you will enjoy riding on country roads with Dory–especially the beautiful backroad to Whidbey!!
You do realize that the hatchback is on the rear so she has a big smile on her bum not her face. 🙂
I know we’ll enjoy riding around once we get used to it. We’ve already been thinking about trips. When Ryan’s foot is feeling a little better we’ll be going to Paradise to hike around. We also want to go camping sometime this summer.
I think it will be a while before we make it up to Whidbey– no way do I want to be the car parked on the uphill slope of the ferry!