Labor and Delivery

Where was Leslie on Friday?:
A)Burden Honda Care B)CarMax C)Joe Myers Toyota D)K&J Automotive E)all of them

Labor pains began at 8 a.m. when I took the Odyssey to Burden to have the belt tensioner (& belt) replaced. We waited too long after my temporary fix there three weeks ago, and the squeal was so loud and consistent, it had to be fixed. Another $160 spent on the "Horrid Honda". See previous post for that saga.

Brief stop at home to gather all the necessary paperwork and then to CarMax for a 10a.m. appointment with Jim. While the Honda is being appraised, I test drive a Corolla with Jim. They don't have any manual transmissions at this CarMax location so I drive an automatic. I am very impressed with it's pick-up, handling and ride comfort. After the test drive I find out what CarMax will pay us to trade or buy outright the Honda. It's right at the price I had researched online, so I'm content. I left with the seven day guarantee paper.

Another stop at home to grab some lunch and then over to Joe Myers Toyota because they have a 5-speed Corolla and I want to test drive it and also see what they will give us for a trade. Not only does it drive well, but they had reduced the price from what the web site showed. I call Tim at work to tell him they were letting me take the Corolla home and keeping the Honda to appraise. He tells me to take the car to our mechanic. So without stopping at home (or passing GO), I head to K&J Automotive.

They are the absolutely nicest auto shop and James stops and gives it a look over and a clean bill of health.

I head home to await Tim. He arrives shortly after me and we go for more test driving and decide to go negotiate.

Back to Joe Myers. Lots of talking, phone calls, paper shuffling, and WAITING. They won't give us as much as CarMax for the Honda, even after much back and forth, so we decide Tim will stay there and start the Corolla paperwork, I'll take the car to CarMax to start the selling of it and he'll join me there to finalize the sale and then I'll go back to Joe Myers to finalize purchase. Off down the road to CarMax I head, when Tim calls and says the sales manager ask me to return.

Back I go. It's not that bad as the dealers are within spitting distance of each other.

The sales managers agrees to offer us comparable and so we trade the Honda to them.

We then have to wait for the finance guy. He's a Christian and makes all the tedious stuff as fun as possible. We had pre-approval with the same Credit Union we had the Honda with for a loan, but we were pleasantly surprised that Joe Myers credit union conglomerate beat it by a whole point. We are awesomely blessed with a new loan rate of 4.54%.

Lots of paper signing and then finally off to bring the new baby home. But, they are way behind in the prep area and haven't even started cleaning her up. We decide to have her "detailed" when we go back for tags etc... and leave the dealer at about 7:30.

Twelve hours of labor. We are thankful it's over.