Car #7: Leopold

Shhh! Sarah thinks I've wandered off to do something useful for the collective, when I've in fact snuck in here to blog quickly, to get my blog up before she does. We are a family of bloggers; so there's sometimes a race for the scoop.

The scoop in this instance is our new car!

Her name is Leopold. We went through quite a negotiation to arrive at an appellation suitable to us all. For a while in there, Kepler wanted to name her "Sucky the Leopard". He's funny.

But now she's Leopold, and she's a beaut, a Toyota Corrolla Verso with as many airbags as a three-toed sloth has toes if he only had three feet, and as many seats as two fiffer-feffer-feffs have feathers, if one of them is missing one. She starts right up, and she's shiny and she smells like car-factory chemicals. We like her. Kepler likes her. Ta da.

Saying goodbye to Hydrangea was a little sad, though. Especially for Kepler.

In 6 months of ownership, we'd taken Hydrangea to northern Scotland and back, found and bought a house with her help, and explored our new environs. But it's time for her to find a new home, or better yet a pasture somewhere, a place where the dew never condenses, where petrol flows like water through the creeks, where she can blissfully pass the remainder of her days. That's what Kepler would like to believe, anyway. The fact is that Hydrangea turned out to be missing several of her less-essential engine components, and have several others, like the catalytic converter, appear more home-made than we were comfortable with. To pour money into a ten-year-old car, a ten-year-old French car, didn't seem smart.

And now, I'm going to sneak back in to the other room and do something more useful for the collective.

Welcome home, Leopold! We have a lot of exploring to do together!