R.I.P., Pimp

Well, this past winter has been SO cold! Chad's car, the red Toyota Camry, has been on its last toenail (way worse than its last leg) for the longest time now. The cold winter has not helped. He just chugga chuggas to work and home and doesn't dare drive it any other place. It has no heater or AC and so this winter has been difficult for Chad in terms of comfort level in his car as well. At the beginning of the month, we had to seriously start looking at another option for a vehicle for Chad. Chad's Camry, "Pimp", "Red Rocket", whatever you wanted to call it, was going to die.

Chad's been dreaming of a truck for many years now. It is probably what has gotten him through all the years of driving the Camry. Don't get me wrong, the Camry was a godsend when we got it and it is impressive to me that it is from 1993 and still chugging away. But it was not going to last forever. And so we began looking for trucks. Not really thinking we could find one, but just curious. And we went for some test drives. Chad decided he would be happy with a Toyota again, since the Camry lasted so long. He would have been happy with another make too, but the trucks that were available like what we wanted, were Toyotas. We went through Car Max (and to this day, Andrew still calls every car dealership we pass Car Max since we visited so many dealers with our kids in tow) and we found several we liked. We found one that had a lot of features that we wanted, plus several other extra things, in the range we wanted, but had a really weird smell. Aubs said when she got in, "it smells like a hotel!" And it did have a musty sort of smell to it. We decided we liked that one the best but we wished it didn't smell like that. The salesman we had said he would treat it and we could come back. And we did, and it was better, but still there. We weren't convinced we could live with the smell so we decided against that truck. We were disappointed-- we thought that was the perfect truck for us, if not for the smell! And a few days later, after we'd seen some other trucks, we decided we wished we hadn't said no. So we called back and it was still available! So we jumped at the chance. And Chad came home with his Valentine's Day present:



And it was a very red, very large, gift we got for him. Perfect for Valentine's Day. He is a very happy man.