Merlot: Our New Car

 

Here's another for-the-record post, lest we forget (and before November flies off the calendar)!

It was an unexpected decision, to be honest.  Astrid had just completed a major maintenance on our 2013 Škoda Citigo on September 19, including a new battery and brakes, making us feel like the car was good to go for at least a couple more years...until out of the blue, a couple of days later, I asked her if she thought this might be a good time to trade it in on a new car.  Surprisingly, she had been thinking the same thing the day before, without telling me.

So, there you have it.  Both of us were on the same page and our guy, Pedro, said that at 80K km, we were at the sweet-spot for selling it.  

BUT, Škoda stopped making the Citigo after 2019!  Bummer.  We really liked the car and didn't fancy anything else...until Pedro said that the VW UP! car is almost exactly the same car, which we might be interested in?

Fast forward to quick decisions and Astrid LOVING the merlot-red he showed her, followed by us visiting him to make the deal the week before we left for America and picking it up 2 days after we returned, on November 10.  

The red car on the dealership floor the day we made the deal was the car we bought...

with only 17 km on the odometer.  It's a 2023 car and the last year VW is making this model.

European car makers are now gearing up for their electric cars.

This is the 3rd car Pedro has sold us

and, each time, he has presented it to us like this.

It really WAS like opening a present!  How fun.

And until we decide otherwise, we're calling her Merlot.

The reason why I say this is for the record is because we really DO forget...until we look at the past posts and remember:  "Ahhh, yes, THAT'S what we did and THAT'S how it happened."

I arrived here in the Netherlands on December 5, 2009.  We got married on February 5, 2010, and bought our first car, a 2010 Daihatsu Cuore, from Pedro on March 5, a month later:

We called her Granny Towanda

because of Granny-Smith green apples and Fried Green Tomatoes.

Fast forward 4 years to January 2014 when, at 48K km, we decided to trade her in for our second car.

No longer cost-effective, Daihatsu had stopped making the Cuore.

So Pedro was now selling Škodas and sold us a 2013 demo that had 6,500 km on it.

Her official color was silverleaf but quickly became our Sand Dollar, 

never a true silver, especially when parked next to silver cars.

There you have it, again.  Our guess is that this will be our last car before we're forced to go electric.  Right now Europe is way behind America in infra-structure readiness, so that could easily be several years from now.  Our Škoda Citigo lasted us 10 years, so we expect nothing less from our VW UP!  

Of course, maybe by then neither one of us will be driving anything anymore!  HA!  (We really aren't getting any younger.)

BTW, 16 years ago today I met Astrid in real life for the first time.

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY to us!