Post-accident car shopping, part III: We try Wasilla

Soon it was the next day, Saturday, and I did not want to go to Kendall Ford. I didn't want to go back to Anchorage, either. I just wanted to stay home, but we had just over two days before we had to return the rental car to Enterprise and I had to get this car shopping done.

So I dropped Margie off at Wal-Mart after lunch and then headed to Kendall Ford, right here in Wasilla, Alaska. What you see above is what I saw when I got there, right after I stepped out of the rental car. For those of you who care about this kind of thing, the temperature was about -20 F (compared to -50's and -60's in several Interior Alaska communities).

This is Bob, the salesman who was standing at the door when I entered. He used to be a photographer in Livingston, Montana, before he left that state for Alaska to escape the teeming crowds. He immediately took my case and brought me into his cubbyhole. I told him that I was mighty interested in the Toyota RAV, but was willing to take a look at the Escape.

He said that the RAV was a real good car, but the Escape was even better. I told him the Toyota salesman told me that the Escape was a great car, but the RAV was even better. He said one could look up comparisons on the internet and then he was quite certain the Escape would come out ahead.

We talked about other aspects, too, like gas mileage, insurance, colors and such.

I was tired and sleepy, so he gave me a cup of coffee. I appreciated the generosity and the caffeine worked okay, but the coffee was not very good.

Bob elicited the help of a colleague named Steve to take me on a test drive of a red Escape, the color that I had requested. It took about half-an-hour for him to get it warmed up enough where he felt comfortable taking me out in it.

In the meantime, I chatted with Bob, and sipped very slowly on that coffee.

Here we go on the test drive. Driving the Taurus, even with winter-tires and studs, I have become accustomed to slipping and sliding a bit everywhere I go around here this time of year. The Escape just had factory tires and no studs. We searched out icy roads, one with a steep hill.

The Escape handled beautifully. It did not slip, it did not slide. As we approached an icy intersection, a guy in a pickup truck ran a stop sign right in front of us, within collision distance. I slammed on the brakes. The Escape stopped in short order.

After we returned, Bob wanted to make a deal with me right then, but I told him I had to discuss it with Margie and that I wanted to compare the Escape and the RAV on the web and sleep on it. I told him I still favored the Toyota, which I had never driven. I told him I would bring Margie back to see the Escape and go for a drive in it.

He said, "okay." He gave me a sheet with numbers on it, something neither of the other two salesman had done. That was where he had the advantage, because those numbers were better than the numbers for the Toyota.

I got on the computer and looked up many comparisons between the RAV 4 and the Escape. They consistently came out exceedingly close together, but with a slight advantage to the RAV.

After I picked Margie up from work and drove her home, I found an email from Bob in my computer. He had sent me a copy of the vehicle sticker. No other salesman emailed me any information. Margie wondered why I only looked at the Escape and the not the Fusion. So I sent an email to Bob and he responded with the same numbers for the Fusion.

Soon it was Sunday. I did not want to go back to Kendall and I did not want to drive to Anchorage. At noon, Jake, Lavina and Kalib joined me in the rental car and we drove to IHOP to meet Margie for breakfast. I had already eaten oatmeal earlier, but so what.

Here we are, driving to IHOP. It is cold weather that makes exhaust thick like this. I bet you could hardly even breathe in Fairbanks on this day.

Margie, Melanie, Lisa and Lavina all accompanied me to look at the Fusion. Margie had slipped on the ice in the Wal-Mart parking lot, had fallen and hurt her knee. She was pretty uncomfortable.

Steve set out to warm up the Fusion. After about 15 minutes, I grew impatient and wanted to take the test drive. "I don't want you to get cold," he said, "maybe we should let it warm up a little longer."

"We're Alaskans," I answered. "It's not going to bother us."

"Okay," he said, "we'll go now."

Here is Melanie, scraping off the windshield just before the test drive. The Fusion handled nice, but it did slip and slide a bit, as one would expect. Then we took another ride in the Escape. I wanted Margie to drive but her knee hurt too bad.

Afterward, of all the cars that we had looked at, Margie was leaning toward the Fusion. Melanie was working hard to find a way to steer us away from Ford altogether. I still liked the RAV best. Bob insisted that he did not want to pressure us, but he did want to make the sale before we left.

He said he had talked to the guy in the big office and he had told him that if we agreed to buy the car tonight, he would throw in an auto start - but only tonight. After tonight, the auto-start would not be available.

Even so, we left to go home and think about it. 

I am not quite sure how we came to what we came to, because all the time I liked the RAV best but had resigned myself to the Fusion but, come Monday, Margie and I were talking. We had to get the deed done before evening, because we needed to turn the rental car back in.

(I must note that Melanie offered to let us borrow her car for a week or two and she would walk about Anchorage and ride the bus and have Charlie take her here and there. It would be worth it, she said, to give us more time to think about it and make the right choice - but I could not take my daughter's transportation from her.)

I felt under terrible pressure. I did not want to drive back to Anchorage and start haggling with Toyota again. I did not want to go back to Kendall.

And then, somehow, we decided to go with the Escape.

So I called Bob and told him to get it ready, "but only if you throw the autostart back in," I said. "Otherwise, we go to Anchorage." When the time came, we drove to Kendall, but before we got there we stopped at A&W/KFC. Here we are, in the drive through. I don't know who the woman ahead of us is. Margie ordered chicken strips, mashed potatoes and Diet Pepsi. I ordered a hamburger and fries, plus Pepsi. 

I have no idea what the woman in front of us ordered.

We parked in the lot to eat our lunch. This raven came hopping to the car. The raven asked me for a french fry, so I gave him one. Or her one. How would I know?

Here we are, in Bob's cubby hole, the Escape that will soon be ours parked outside the window. I do not know who the man is, and I have no idea who he is talking to. I was kind of worried that he might lean against the Escape, but he didn't.

Bob said the man in the office was unhappy that he had thrown the autostart back in. 

One always wonders what really gets said back in the office.

So we financed the Escape for six years, at 4.7 percent interest. This is Ryan, the guy who put the financing together. He is punching numbers. Or maybe he is crunching them. We've got to pay them.

Just before we drive away, Bob points out things like where the coolant goes, how to find the dipstick, the head-bolt heater plug in - stuff like that. 

Then we drove off into the night, me in the Escape, Margie in the Caravan. Her knee still hurt, but she was able to drive it.

Sure enough, when we dropped the Caravan off at Enterprise, they blamed us for the chipped windshield. They hung on to our $50 deposit, said it would be used to fill in the chip and anything left over would be refunded back to our credit card. I protested, because we had nothing to do with any chip in the windshield. He said they had records and could only go by the records, but if someone else, somewhere else, found a record of the already chipped windshield, then we would get the whole $50 back.

I don't hold it against the guys behind the desk. They're just doing their job. Still, those little chips can be hard to see on a walk-around, hard to distinguish from beads of ice. So I am aggravated, to get charged by Enterprise for something that I had nothing to do with.

But that's how it is.

"I think we did the right thing," Margie said as we drove home. "I feel good about it. We bought an American car from an American company. We're bolstering the economy."

And not only that, but in our conversations with Bob, I learned that he has a cat, a Siamese. That cat is always there to greet him when he comes home from work.

Thanks to us, Bob can buy more catfood for that cat.

I feel pretty good about that.

I have changed my mind...

I decided that this idea of putting this blog on hold until sometime after the New Year is nonsense. I am going to keep it going, but will attempt to discipline myself to spend a minimum amount of time on it through that time period, 15 to 30 minutes a day max. Of course, here I have reached the point where I am just starting my third sentence and I have already put more than 20 minutes into it.

Hmmm... part of this is the fault of my bloghost, Squarespace. As I have stated before, it is a buggy program, prone to misfire, and so far tonight I have had to bounce around between three windows in two separate browsers, just to get the photos placed. Some nights it works perfect, some nights it is a nightmare and cannot be brought under control no matter what I do. Tonight it seems to have fallen somewhere in between.

Okay... 25 minutes now...

I awoke very late this morning, I think because of what I went through yesterday and the night before, when I got almost no sleep, as I had to "prep" for the medical procedure referenced yesterday.

Now, I am supposed to eat a great deal of "real oats" until I clear up the damage that all these decades of an abusive diet has done to my digestive system, but after yesterday, I just had to go out for breakfast and get myself some ham and eggs.

I will eat oatmeal tomorrow.

When I walked into Family Restaurant, I saw that this man, Van Buskirk, had just sat down at a table. Sometimes, when I am out walking, he will come driving by and wave, and sometimes he stops alongside me, rolls down his window and we chat for awhile.

I was alone, so I sat down with him.

It has now been 30 minutes. I am behind schedule.

There was much from our conversation that I was going to write, but, as you can see, I am out of time.

I will note this: he served in the Pacific in World War II as part of the Army Air Corp occupation forces and then stayed in the military to make a career of it, but his heart went bad and he got drummed out. He suffered a massive heart attack and later had a few more, plus some strokes.

No one figured that he would last very long, but here he is, Van Buskirk, deep into old age, having breakfast with me at Family Restaurant. The lady showing him the love seems to be in charge of all the waitresses.

Van Buskirk picked up my ticket. I got out my wallet to at least leave the tip, but he insisted that I put it back into my pocket.

Thank you, Van Buskirk!

I should add that, after the waitress brought our food, he bowed his head and said a blessing.

It has now been 38 minutes.

After I got home, I went walking. Not far from where Van Biskirk told me he lives, I saw this secular Christmas display.

The afternoon and evening proved to be snowy and the already icy roads became dangerously slick. In Anchorage, a woman slid over the center line, smacked T-bone into my son Jacob's Tahoe and knocked him into the ditch. He did not seem to be hurt, although now he is quite stiff. Margie was at work and so, instead of working myself, I spent four hours alone with Kalib, until Jacob and Lavina finally got home.

Kalib had a great time, being alone with his youthful gramp. I enjoyed him, too, but I was left to wonder how my wife keeps up with him all day long.

During his waking hours, Kalib does not stop. I was going to describe some of his antics, but I have already exceeded my time limit by over 10 minutes.

I still must go back and put in the code that turns the opening words to every section red. If Squarespace would simply put a color button into their editor, this would be a simple task that would take seconds. I have suggested this to them a number of times, but they have some high falutin idea that they are going to force their customers to use headers correctly and they think their customers will just be lazy and ignore headers altogether if they have an option to colorize sentences, words, and letters at will.

Of course, highlighting text in the body of the blog has nothing to do with headers.

So far, they continue to refuse to add this simple feature - as well as to do many other things that would make life easier for a Squarespace blogger.

I shouldn't vent like this, but, damnit, sometimes, when you blog, and write what just comes off your fingertips as they move, you vent.

When I started this blog, I should not have leaped so fast. Now I am stuck with Squarespace - for awhile, at least. Maybe they will solve these problems and I can just stay with them.

Kalib turns on the charm for Granny B waitress; jet passes overhead; Lisa at work

It was just after noon and I had eaten nothing since last evening, as I had to do a blood draw today. After the draw, we headed toward Anchorage to see a movie and to drop Kalib off with his parents, but first I needed to eat so we stopped at Granny B's, where they serve breakfast all day.

Kalib quickly began to flirt with the waitress.

She was a pushover; she quickly succumbed to his charms.

Kalib enjoyed the attention. Breakfast was good. Afterward, we dropped Kalib off at his Dad's place of work, where they were having a Christmas party and he would meet Santa.  We then headed to the movie.

Slumdog Millionaire is what we saw. One of the characters in it was named Latika and in one scene, when she was a young girl begging on the streets of Mumbai, she reminded of a very specific young beggar girl who crossed my path in Bangalore. 

The movie got out about 3:45, so we climbed into the car to drive to see Lisa and this is what it looked like at that time.

Lisa at work at the admissions desk at the family medicine clinic of the Alaska Native Medical Center.

After we got home, I found the pictures of the girl in Bangalore and I was going to put them in this post. I decided the post had enough images, however.

So I will make a follow-up post, and put the Latika who was probably not Latika at all in that entry.

Cinnamon roll at Mocha Moose, rescue vehicle gets stuck, Kalib hurls Kleenix to the floor

I don't often go to Mocha Moose, but this afternoon I wanted a cinnamon role and they have some pretty good ones. So, at 4:00 PM, I ignored my usual places and went to Mocha Moose. Here I am, waiting in line.

The lady ahead of me gets her coffee. She did not get a cinnamon roll. I don't know why. I'm pretty certain she would have enjoyed her coffee more if she had a cinnamon roll.

Earlier in the day, about noon, when I went walking, I came upon the same van that I had found stuck Monday night and had photographed on Tuesday - the day the worried owner had told me he would come back and yank it out.

Looks like he came back all right, with help, and that help got stuck, too. You can see that they even tried to yank out the help vehicle, but had not succeeded. At least the third vehicle did not get stuck.

These kinds of exciting events take place continually right here, in Wasilla, Alaska.

Muzzy gives the scene some perspective. Actually, the van had moved a fair piece from where I found it Monday. And no one had vandalized it.

Kalib discovered Kleenix, and how fun it is to remove one, throw it on the floor and remove another. When an adult tells him to stop it, he just smiles at the defenseless sould like this, removes another tissue and hurls it onto the floor.

"Stop it, Kalib! Stop it right now!"

And here is the garden center end of Wal-Mart. I brought some blooming tulips back and replanted them in the back yard.

How pretty they looked in the snow! I tried to photograph them for you, but it was beyond my meagre abilities to do justice to such beauty and I did not succeed.

Fairbanks, mid-afternoon, minus 18 F, the ice cream is cold

But the coffee is hot. And very soon in Fairbanks, when the temperature rises to minus 18, it will feel warm. A soft ice-cream cone will seem just right.