Our New Car

Robin and I bought ourselves a new car over the weekend: A 2006 Scion xB. It’s boxy, white and cute.

The thing we like the most is the amount of space present in the car. It’s huge inside. The backseat has enough space to easily cross your legs without touching the seat in front. I could almost wear a top-hat in the car!

It’s a used car. It had 19,000 miles when we bought it. Our mechanic has checked it from top-to-bottom and said it looked good.

The only potential downside is that it is a manual transmission. Personally, I don’t mind it; I’ve wanted an excuse to get good at driving a stick for a while.

Robin has driven a motorcycle but hasn’t had any experience driving a manual-transmission car.

We’ve been driving to the water front to practice in their parking lots. Robin’s gotten quite good with (relatively) flat surfaces.

Now we need to get her some practice on some real hills.

I was thinking of going to one of the bigger hills and finding as spot where there are empty parallel parking spots and stopping there. Then letting Robin start from a stand-still there. That way there would be space to go backwards without hitting anything or blocking traffic.

I may stay outside the car to watch for traffic, etc. Not sure. To bad not many parking lots are on hills. ;-/

Ciao!