Address and... A NEW CAR!

Okay, so it sounds all fun, like the Price is Right. It's not.


First, the practical information. The Lolos reminded us of the need to disperse our information.

Address: 83 Waimairi Road
Ilam
Christchurch
8041
New Zealand

Secondly, in hopefully our most definitive step toward settling in for the six... five remaining months, we finally bought a car yesterday. I need to post photos of the tike. It is a 12 year-old Toyota Camry. It will fit in well with the rest of the cars around here. Very few cars are new here; most are older and come from Japan, where there are tight regulations on the permissible age of cars. Here, in complement, there is no import duty on cars, so they are cheap! The price of the thing: NZ$2200, slightly less than US$2000.


Just getting to the car auction was an escapade which emphasized our need for the car. The auction would only be 5 minute drive from work, but I rode my bicycle 15 minutes home so that we could go get it together. I hurriedly changed clothes, and we grabbed the car seats, the two kids, and the stroller to board the bus. It was just our luck that this one would be piloted by a fellow from India, who had enough trouble with English, and I would propose that my accent posed even more difficulty. In addition, I don't think that he knew his roads much better than I, because when I asked him if there was a stop at the intersection with Lincoln Road, he made me repeat it a couple of times then said he was going down Barrenger Road. Later he added that I must mean Lyndon Road. I think this is a road nowhere near our proposed destination.


When we got to the right area, we pulled up to a bus stop. I asked if it was the closest stop to Lincoln, to which he replied that it was a long way down Barrenger Street. So we waited until the next stop.

As we walked the 10 minutes back toward the previous stop, we began to worry that we would miss the auction of our preferred vehicles. Long story a little shorter, we didn't get lost, but we had to reroute because the road the map appeared to show as a through-street dead-ended into a fenced-in set of railroad tracks.

Well, we weren't too late, despite the auction being half over by the time we got there. No one else even bid on our car. Maybe it was our determined looks. Or the car seats, little children, stroller, and our dinner of PBJ's while we sat out in a cold auction that evoked sympathy. Or maybe it was the car.


The longer we had the car, the more I leaned toward the last hypothesis, beginning about 45 seconds after the auctioneer's gavel came down. And the lean became more of a scrum-like lunge. Our ticket to freedom is being towed to a garage tomorrow for a new battery, the new inspection sticker, and the inspection we should have asked for a couple of days ago.

More photos soon to come