Rambling Silver Rose II

[mdlbear]

... so I drove down to the Lincoln/Mercury dealer to meet the flower_cat and get the bad news about her van. It was, in short, bad: the bill for the repairs (which they'd gotten part-way through before noticing the more serious problems) amounted to about twice what the thing was worth (we found out later that the old van's Blue Book value was about $2K).

We spent some time cleaning out the old van, then went through the lot with a salesman looking for a replacement. After looking at several Ford, Mercury, and Jeep SUV's (mostly too high, with insufficient cargo space); a couple of large sedans with not-quite-big-enough trunks, and a Ford Escort wagon, we ended up with a 2005 Ford Freestar van on the top of the list. 17K miles, 6-year warranty, huge space in back (especially with the back seat folded down into the floor, but when it's not folded down there's a foot or so more headroom in the cargo section in back -- nice touch). And to top it off, it's silver, like our first Villager. We'd had to settle for white when the old one was totalled.

So we drove home, considerably deeper in debt, in our second Rambling Silver Rose.