The lease for my Accent is up, and while the buyout’s pretty attractive, it’s just not a great car for a family. Two doors, small back seat, and it probably needs about a thousand bucks in maintenance to keep her on the road (new tires, a couple of scratches that need to get taken care of this summer, that sort of stuff), so it was time to look for a new car. After quite a bit of looking, we settled on the Mazda 5. It’s a CUV (crossover utility vehicle), with six seats, van style rear doors, and fold down seats that flatten right out (to let me carry loads of wood!).

Then it was time to actually FIND one. We looked at one last weekend which was for sale here in town, but it was sold midway through the week. I saw that they still had a silver one on the lot, so we went back Saturday morning to work out a deal.

I took it out for a test drive, went back to the dealership, and the sales guy told me that it had just sold earlier in the morning and nobody put a sold sign on it. ZUT!

So after taking K to the mall for lunch and then Toys R Us for some fun shopping (where she cracked her head on the floor while playing in a wheelbarrow) we went home, a little bit disappointed, and looked online for others. I called a bunch of Mazda dealerships, and we checked Auto Trader, where we found a couple of Mazda 5’s in Guelph. One of them was a GT model, the other a GS (the main differences are a sunroof in the GT, and cruise control is standard in the GT). So off to Guelph we drove.

We got there to find out that the GT was sold, so we checked out the GS. It’s in great shape, has cruise (which I wanted), and looks like it has a 6 disc in dash changer (which I don’t so much care about since I listen to my iPod not CD’s). Plus it was on sale, for $3,000 less than we were prepared to pay for the London car.

We filled out the paperwork, and Monday or Wednesday night we’ll be driving back to Guelph to pick up our new (2006) car!

Zoom Zoom indeed!