Wheels and 'Roos

That's right folks...after nearly 6 glorious months of not owning a vehicle, we purchased a car. We are the proud owners of a 1994 Honda Civic. Yes, that's right, we bought an 18 year old car. It's actually in fantastic shape on the interior and exterior, and we are hoping that the important parts of the car are in good condition as well. If you are reading this and you know my family, you'll know that we have quite a long tradition of driving Honda's well into the 200,000 mile range, and this little car has yet to put on 200,000 kilometers, so hopefully she'll be good to us.

I'm thinking "she" needs a name. Any ideas?!

I was VERY opposed to a red car. No clue as to why, but I'm biased against red and would have much preferred white, black, or silver. I did have a framed photo of a red Trans Am, won from the Reese Carnival, on my wall as a tween, so maybe I was destined to own a red car at some point in my life? At any rate, I told the car salesman my feelings about red and he took a couple hundred dollars off the sale price, so we were sold. The car buying process was quite an adventure. We drove a few cars from private sellers and a few from dealers, but decided that buying from a dealer was easier. Our dealer, MJ's Crazy Cars, seemed to be honest and reliable in the beginning, but we aren't so sure about that now.

Erik went to pick up the car on his own and when he got the car home, we noticed that it was missing the button to control the temperature. We also noticed that the seals on the windshield, which we were told would be fixed during an inspection, were not fixed. We called our salesman, Ben, and he said he would fix both if we brought it down to the dealer. So last weekend, we dropped the car off and rode our bikes an hour home. Ben called on Friday and said that they were unable to find a part for the temperature control, but that our car was ready otherwise. Erik biked an hour down to the dealer after work to find our car hadn't been fixed AT ALL! The seals looked exactly the same but there was a bunch of sticky residue on the car's paint like they maybe had prepped to fix it but actually did not. So we have pretty much given up on getting anything else fixed by them. Obviously those items aren't crucial for the car to run, but we were thinking about resale value when we try to sell the car in 2.5 years.

Due to this new concept of owning a car, we were able to get out of Melbourne a bit this weekend. We had a birthday party to attend out East, so we decided to drive a bit past the party to check out a place where we might come across some kangaroos. I would say that we had GREAT success on that end! I was trying not to get my hopes up too much because I didn't want to be disappointed, but within a minute of arriving to Cardinia Reservoir Park, we spotted a few grey kangaroos. It was almost dusk, and during the course of the 7 o'clock hour, about a hundred or so kangaroos came out of the woods. Of course for Australians this is really no big deal, because 'roos are comparable to deer back in the States, but I was pretty excited to be seeing them in the wild. Instead of sharing lots of pictures with you, I made a short video of our kangaroo-viewing experience. Enjoy!


Last week I also attended a wine tasting event at Federation Square (the same location as the beer tasting), which was a great opportunity to taste some of the local wines. I now have some ideas of what local wineries would be good to visit, and hope to do a trip to a winery or two sometime in the near future.