Big Day

I've been talking about it, researching it, and working on it for a long time, but today is the big day. I finally took possession of a 2009 Subaru Forester after a long wait and a lot of looking around for one. It was overall bad timing on my part: wanting to get the newest of the new model year for this major rebuild of the Forester model and at the same time catching the purchase right at the (hopefully) peak of the latest gas-price escalations to $4 a gallon.



I had to do something to to supplement my auto choices. I simply haven't felt like I could take off by myself in my pickup to the mountains to paddle when it was taking $200 in gas up there and back. Don't get me wrong...the Tundra is still parked outside ready to go when we need to haul a load or have a good carpool of 4 or more.

It was a fairly painful process even though I used the ACA benefit of their VIP Partners program to get dealer invoice minus 2% pricing. That's a long story I might carp about in another post sometime, but I do want to give a lot of credit to Strider Subaru in Asheboro, NC for giving me what I believe to be a good bargain and up-front and friendly service. Thanks to Ricky McNeill there for helping me with this purchase, which finally entailed ordering the car from the factory to get exactly what I wanted. I got a LOT worse treatment and supposed bargains elsewhere in the shopping process and Strider and Ricky shone bright in that field.

The mileage computer was saying 29.7 MPG average for the trip from Asheboro home, so the drive was instant gratification. I'm looking forward to taking advantage of that this weekend and if the planets align properly, I might head to Virginia to help out with an adaptive paddling trip on the James with the Wintergreen folks.

I have some more activities of late to document, but I might just hold off another day and break up the posts.

Mañana.