We've been having a big problem. And I just couldn't take it anymore.
We bought a minivan.
You see, we travel a lot. A LOT. Some of my friends have joked that we're gone more weekends than we stay in town. We drive regularly to New Jersey, Delaware, and Ohio to visit my husband's various relatives. We drive occasionally to Florida to visit my relatives. And for the last year and a half we've been doing all that driving - all five of us - in tiny little cars. Our options were a too-little Jeep Liberty, the car we bought when we first married, or an itty bitty Toyota Corolla, the car we bought for me to commute to law school. In December Chachoo, (my husband's brother who lives with us) bought his own car and our options were expanded to include a Mazda 3. Except that's not really an expansion because it's even smaller that the Corolla. But we still stuffed all five of us into it for a drive to New Jersey once. We almost always travel in the Corolla because it gets so much better gas mileage. But the two times we drove to Florida we took the Jeep. It's was the largest of the cars, though not by much, and with a 16 hour drive you really need as much room & comfort as you can get.
It really was too much to ask though, to have poor Dulhan and Chachoo wedge themselves into such a small space. But they preferred it over taking two cars. Since Dulhan moved here, though, I've wanted to buy something with a third row of seats in it. Mian and I actually had some tense conversations because I wanted to buy something bigger a lot sooner and he thought we couldn't afford it. He was right, of course, but so was I that we really needed a solution to our expanding family. The paychecks I've been getting recently helped us to be able to afford it. And when it was decided that my mother-in-law and father-in-law were going to be visiting America this summer, I knew we'd soon finally be buying one.
(I think it's so funny that our impetus for buying a minivan - our expanding family - is seemingly so typical but for most normal people that means another kid on the way. In my case? It means two elderly Pakistanis. Ah, the Gori Wife Life!)
Mian has this way of buying new cars. He went to school with a guy who bought a car this was after he graduated and he's been holding on to the idea for years and was finally able to try it out when he helped Chachoo buy his Mazda. We went to test drive a couple times but when we'd decided exactly what we wanted (A Honda Odyssey) he contacted all the Honda dealers in this area and asked them for their best deal. Once he had the lowest two or three he pitted them against each other - all over email - to get them to lower their asking price even further until he ended up several thousand dollars under what we'd expected to pay. You have to make sure you specify exactly what you want in the car and specify that the price includes all the various options you want and tax, tag and titles fees so that the dealer can't try to up the price once you get there. That was especially true for us because the lowest priced dealer ended up being an hour drive away. It would have sucked to drive for an hour just to have the deal fall through and drive back still at square one. But luckily that didn't happen and if you live anywhere near the DC metro area I can personally vouch for my experiences with Sport Honda in Silver Spring, Maryland. They didn't give us any run around. M says that when they bought the Mazda at a different dealer, they kept going on and on about how they were getting a really good deal and not really treating them very well. That didn't happen with us and every interaction I've had with our dealer and our salesman (Chris Lee) has been extremely, extremely positive. (And we paying for the car ourselves - neither Honda nor the dealer have any idea I'm writing this)
Driving in a minivan - I cannot tell you. It is fantastically comfortable. We all have so much room to spread out and all manners of storage so that there's not a pile of crap in anyone's lap. I used to have the GPS, Mian's & my phones, Mian's shahi supari, and a computer in my lap during drives. A computer, you ask? What, doesn't everyone drive down major highways Skype-ing with their oversees relatives? No, just us? Oh...
We're actually in the car right now as we speak. (As we type?) We're on our way to Ohio to visit Mian's sister (my sister-in-law) who had a new baby girl three weeks ago. Gotta love technology. And minivans.
I'm a convert - I love my minivan! It's just one more product of my strange half-Pakistani life that I never would have expected but end up loving.
