It happens rarely - 1997, 2003 and today

There are some things that don't happen often in my life. Like buying cars.

I bought my Toyota Corolla in 1997 so it is now 13 years old, Luke and I bought our Nissan X-Trail in 2003 when Princess G arrived into our family and today we did it again - we bought a car to replace the Corolla. Pics are above. A new Ford Focus Zetec. Silver (as if that wasn't obvious in the pics!), all the safety features possible (very important on my shopping list), and Luke was happy as he wanted electric windows and to be able to connect his iPod....and tick to both of those.

What makes this purchase rather remarkable for us, other than the fact two Accountants have let $ out of their wallets and spent money, is the fact we've been contemplating this purchase for nearly 3 years. And I know that because I just found photos taken at in early 2007 of a Focus Luke brought home from a car dealer at lunch time one day. We have a rather steep driveaway so we had to see if the car would go down it....and yes it did....unlike the Mazda 3 which wouldn't.

So after nearly 3 years of deliberating and tooing and froing and worrying (on my part) and putting it on the back burner repeatedly (on Luke's part), I got up this morning and decided enough was enough and it was 'Buy A Car Day'.

By 7am I'd found the car on a car sales website, by 8am we'd heard from the dealer it was available, we were driving it by 10am, we brought it home for a test drive to go up and down the driveway and in and out of the very snug fitting garage. And then we pondered and thought and looked on some more websites and compared more cars and decided yes, this was it. So back to the dealer, did the obligatory haggling and by 2pm we were home after signing papers. We pick it up in the last week of January.

Here's to Luke and the Ford have many years of safe, incident free and comfortable commuting between here and work (into the City - a whole 6km or about 4 miles but always done in crazy, horrid peak hour traffic) for the next decade or so.

Based on the car buying interval precendent so far (six years between one and two and seven years between three and four), it should be 2018 before I have to buy a car again. One can only hope!