New van & Temporary lakefront property

So, yesterday was a big day for us. With our third kiddo on the way imminently (sometime around July 21st), we were in a bit of a crunch for a new vehicle. Three car seats in a Chevy Cruze is maybe technically not Impossible, but it's darn close to impossible.

It was time for an upgrade to the Minivan Life. We've been keeping a passive eye on the used market here for a few months, and it's mostly full of old Dodge Grand Caravans that were previously taxis or castoffs from other families that upgraded. While it's a fine vehicle, we were hoping to find something with a bit more reliability as it will be our primary vehicle for hauling the kids around going forward.

Well, I got lucky - I noticed a small city about two hours away had just listed a used 2020 Chrysler Pacifica - which is generally a very well-liked and highly-rated minivan. It was within our price-range, and was an easy 10k less than anything similar I had seen in my own city.

So, we took the drive down after dropping the kids at daycare and started everything in motion. It took, honestly, most of the day to get the deal done, get the vehicle registered, and bring it back home. We had left town at 10am, and we ended up picking the kids up from daycare at about 5:10pm, which was ten minutes late for pickup, but thankfully our daycare was very understanding.

This is, quite honestly, the first vehicle I've ever owned myself. I've never needed a vehicle before. For the vast majority of my life, public transit did everything I needed. Once I was married, my wife had a car so we'd just both use it. It wasn't until we sat down to decide who this should be registered to that I began thinking it might be kind of nice to have one of our two vehicles as "mine".

So, that's what we did. And, I'm pretty proud of it. It's not some fancy sports car or anything, but it is quite a nice little minivan and growing up on a farm... I've always been a fan of vehicles with a bit more height. I'm used to big old farm trucks! I only got used to cars because that's what my wife prefers.

So, anyhow, with all that done we realized: oh no, in the rush to get back to town, we forgot to pick up a birthday gift for a friend of my son's. So, we loaded the kids up in the car (as it still has the carseats in it) and rushed back to the city to snag a last-minute gift so we'd be ready for the party today.

As we got back from the city 45 minutes later, we were greated with a freaking lake down our street. Apparently, in the 45 minutes we were gone, our little town had gotten blasted with 3 inches of rain and a ton of hail.

This was not the kind of lakefront property I was hoping to own! LOL

Now, my garage is small, so while the Cruze fits well enough, the van is about 10 inches larger than my garage can compensate. The previous owners sacrificed garage space to make a first-floor washer/dryer spot, which I admit is handy, but it does mean the van lives outside now. And, as mentioned, we got smashed with hail literally an hour after I got it back from the dealership.

In the photos above, that white line is the hail that was pooled at the high-water level, prior to some of the water draining out of town.

Thankfully, the hail mostly started on the other side of the street and by-and-large just got worse as it worked further north in my little city, so we didn't have any damage. We also are sitting on something of a little hill for our corner property, so unlike a lot of folks we didn't have any basement flooding to deal with. That much rain (2.5 - 4 inches in various parts of town) in 30 minutes was an absolute nightmare for some folks. There are a lot of generators and pumps draining into back alleys today, and I'm sure a lot of insurance claims being processed.

So, it was quite an eventful day here yesterday, but things worked out pretty well and I'm quite pleased to have a fancy new van. Hope you're all doing well today.

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