january jones, vehicular form

 
next important task on our list - get a car. Must we publish to the world my array of chins? 

we'd been keeping an eye out on the interwebs while in berlin, seeing what would be a reasonable deal for us. we need a wagon for all the shit we carry around - i'm partial to discarded logs on the side of the road amongst other potential sculptural materials - and something reliable for a weekly trip back and forth to melbourne, not to mention, general awesome shit that tends to take our fancy, such as gigantic secondhand armchairs and hat stands. 

our budget was basically confined to whatever spare change we had leftover in our pockets. so we scraped together a couple of handfuls of euro cents and realised we were kinda fucked, to be frank. but, i'm not one to let a lack of finance stand in the way of a necessity, so credit card options were put into the background as last resort and we set about scrounging around for cash underneath couch cushions, hidden in boxes and god only knows where.

 this is pretty much every last cent we own, plus some extra we don't technically own, ready to trade it all for a car.

we've got one week to survive on the james family freezer food (hello super mystery casserole items!) until my next scholarship installment, which should keep us alive for another week.

it's 'seat of the pants' stuff for us on this adventure!

We were so nervous about carrying around this cash, that we opted to withdraw it from the Toorak Road  bank rather than Prahran, lest we get jumped by a junkie or desperate pensioner on our way out. If anyone is wondering if there is such a thing as a bank with no lines, it is in fact, the Toorak Road Commonwealth bank, where staff to customer ratio is 5:1 and the amount of space is about 7 times the size of our flat in Berlin. The place is filled with arm chairs and muffled silence. 

anyway, as far as cars go, we pretty much settled on an old subaru, maybe a camry. and by old, i mean like late 80s models, maybe early 90s if we were lucky. we narrowed the search down to a couple of cars and set off to do some test drives.

we drove a sooby (subaru) out in braybrook way, which was ok, but had about 330 000kms on it. which is actually pretty good, considering it was over 22 years old. it seemed all right and atleast confirmed that soobies were ok to drive.

but then we stumbled on a 1990 sooby, with half as many kms and it drove like a dream. it seemed remarkably well priced for what it was, even if it was at the slightly higher end of our $2-3k limit. so after we both checked it out, we snapped her up!

so there it is!! She so fine! We've named her sweet-ass Betty (hence Kent's longwinded confusing title - I expect no less). We have managed to convince ourselves that our slightly odd car-salesman (well, aren't they all?) keeps a sack of white hair and lint in his desk drawer so that he can sprinkle it throughout the cars he sells, to legitimise "aaaw yeah, little old lady owner, barely drove it." Needless to say, the clumps of hair are an issue. 

It's funny coz my first car was a white station wagon, lucy's first car was a white station wagon, and now our first car together is also a white station wagon. weird, no?! Maybe we just like white station wagons. Well, that, and the fact that they seem to represent the dorkiest cars in existence, thus the most reliable and affordable.