WHICH ONE????

We have two vehicles. A Ford Windstar van with 210,000 miles on it, and a Chevy Tahoe that has 175,00 (purchased from my dad almost 2 years ago for well under Blue Book. THANKS DAD!) We knew the van was going to die soon, and have been anxiously awaiting tax time to get a something to replace it.

Unfortunately the car god had other plans. When Dean left for work at 5:30 Wednesday morning, in the dark of the early morning he didn't see the HUGE puddle of oil under the van. I kid you not, every drop that was in the engine had to have ended up on the driveway. Dean got a mile down the road when the oil light came on and seconds later the engine seized up. So I dragged Angela out of bed into the frigid -4* air to go pick him up. Dean went back with the Tahoe to clean out the enormous amount of "shtuff" that he had in the van, and to meet the tow truck that would take it to it's final resting place.

So NOW what? Ok...buy a car. Great. There's no way in the world I can get a loan. Dean can but doesn't want to. So we did some calling around, and figured out our financing options (lucky for us, Dean has awesome credit!) Now all that's left is to figure out what to get!

There are only 3 of us living in the house, but there are also 3 big dogs. It's not often I have all 3 dogs with me, but I do need room to have at least one should the need arise. Four wheel drive is a plus (you should see our driveway!) but not an absolute necessity. Mileage is definitely something that needs to be considered as well. I really don't want to drive a wagon again, but the cross-overs are interesting, particularly the Nissan Murano and the Saturn Outlook.

We're also looking at smaller SUV's like the Santa Fe, Vue, and the Pathfinder.

We ran into one Honda Element that Dean really likes. I'm not sold on those yet. I hear they get great mileage, and SUPER if you have dogs and kids, as the floor is rubber so no carpet to get dirty. But I also hear they're not the most comfortable to drive. They're also a manual transmission, which doesn't bother me, but WHERE the shifter is does. It's on the dash instead of at your side. We haven't driven it yet so we'll see how that feels tomorrow.

What I fell in love with was the Jeep Liberty. This is no surprise as myy sister used to have one and I LOVED IT! However, all the used ones I looked up were well out of our price range. Lucky for me, at our last stop we stumbled upon two 2006's with low miles (lease returns) and price tag we both liked. The first one we saw...the one I was drooling on...was black, to which Dean said, "I hate black." I reminded him who would be driving it and washing it. Then as we walked away we spotted the other one which was my favorite color blue. We'll be driving those tomorrow for sure!