Look, you don't mess with fortune cookies

The grandkids loved riding in The Race Car. (For those of you new to this place, The Race Car was a cute little Miata.) The problem with this was that there are two grandkids and The Race Car only had two seats. As smart and big as Darci is, she could not drive it (but would have loved a shot at it).

In any case, as much fun as The Race Car was to drive, we started to consider moving to a larger version of it - something with a back seat. This was several months ago. I started doing research on what would be the perfect car and we came down to two choices - there really are not many options if you want a non-luxury convertible that seats at least four - the Toyota Solara and a bit surprisingly, the Ford Mustang became our main choices.

As Mrs Notthat will attest, this blog is not known for moving quickly when it comes to dealing with vehicles. The blog seems to always find some reason to put it off for one more week.

But then he got this in a fortune cookie about a week ago.

Wow. Who am I to argue with a fortune cookie. (I briefly entertained the notion that this was referring to a stroller or a shopping cart, but Mrs Notthat quickly corrected those notions.)

So we did some serious looking and found a pretty good candidate at Toyota of Palo Alto. Mrs Notthat did all the work - she went in, made a demand or two, threatened to walk out when they offered a laughable amount for The Race Car (which needed a new top and tires, so we knew it wouldn't get top dollar, but still...), and finally closed the deal. I showed up, signed thirty or so papers (including one that absolved them of any charges should we put on snow chains and take off across the desert, or something like that), and we were out of there.

The thing really is pretty nice looking.

Sadly, when Mrs Notthat went to put in the kid's seats, one of the rear seat belts would not work. After a tiny bit of disassembly, I found this:

This is where the seat belt strap comes out from the top of the seat. Not a big deal, and easy to fix, but it doesn't say much for the thoroughness of Toyota or Palo Alto's service department (which has a lot of bad reviews on Yelp). Needless to say, we won't be going there for service.

The good news is that, this afternoon, the grandkids will finally get to ride in it.

Darci would still like a shot at driving it though...

That's it - move along...