More Car Shopping Days

This post is for several days in Kansas City...

Most of our time in Kansas City was spent car shopping. Jenny did all the brainwork, and Mom and Dad were the chauffeurs -- taking her to the different cars she uncovered on Craigslist. She concentrated on Toyota Echos and Corollas and Honda Civics under $6,000 or so. It was important to complete this before we left, since then she'd have no transportation to the car candidates.

This was a major job: Jenny would run a Carfax report, then Gunilla would take us to a car, Jenny would test drive it, and, if interested, take it to an autoshop for evaluation. Was she successful? Find out at the end of this post.

We also interspersed some unpacking and couch reassembly. Here's the couch put back together:


Another priority was air conditioner shopping. She got this one for her bedroom for $40.

We took some time for walking around and eating. Here's a gondola driver on the river near the plaza near Jenny's apartment:


And Jenny prepared a delayed Mother's Day brunch for Lena:

And here's our shrimp burrito night -- tasty!

Two Gunilla stories:

1. At one point Lena and Jenny were out doing errands. They stopped in a parking lot and asked Gunilla for the closest grocery store, and she told them of a "Price Chopper" supermarket 0.0 miles away. They thought that was a silly answer, until they looked up and saw that they were right in front of the store.

2. One dark night driving back to the apartment, Gunilla really lost it. She kept recalculating and giving weird directions, then she said something completely new. She said "A better route is available." Yeah, no kidding. Not sure how I was supposed to respond to that.

When Jenny got her apartment through an agency, her reward was a $100 gift certificate at Cort's furniture store. While Jenny looked at what she could get for $100, I played with the Warren Buffett cardboard cutout.

This is me giving him stock advice:

We sampled some great barbecue here. The best was Jack Stack's Barbecue. We split a dinner for two (ribs, three kinds of sliced meat, and two orders of beans). There was still too much for us, and we took some meat home for sandwiches the next day.


The food was just about as good at Oklahoma Joe's, situated inside a gas station:

Back to the car shopping. On Wednesday evening, two days before we were scheduled to leave, it was down to two Honda Civics. One was a 2001 around $6,000, with 112,000 miles. It was at a used car dealer's and looked very good, but the mechanics evaluation discovered some problems. The other was a 2001 with 102,000 miles, and only cost $3,700. It did better in its mechanic evaluation, but it was a "salvage" vehicle. That means that it had been totaled. That sounds worse than it was, since it doesn't take much to "total" a vehicle that is almost nine years old. A riskier purchase, but that risk came with a cost savings of over $2,000. Note that Dad stayed out of the decision making.

Speaking of mileage, in the midst of all this driving, our Echo reached the milestone of 150,000 miles:


I wanted to get a photo at exactly 150,000, but that occurred that night in the wilds of Kansas City, when Gunilla was misbehaving.

Jenny did a lot of thinking about these two Civic options, and a lot of bargaining with the motivated sellers. She was just about to pull the trigger, when she spotted a newly posted 2001 Toyota Echo with only 78,000 miles for $4,500. This was just what she'd been looking for. She had the seller meet her at an auto shop where it got a clean bill of health, and after a few hours of haggling, she got it for $4,100.

Note that the above narrative doesn't convey all the complicated logistics of finding mechanics, driving here and there, following each other on the highway, and cell-phone negotiations. These were exhausting days for all.

But we picked up her new car the night before our early departure, and here's her new car, together with ours (all packed up for our return trip):



Stay tuned for our first major mishap!