Zoom Zoom!

We got a new car! And she's a spiffy one! I've always said that Sparkles (my Lexus IS300) was my favorite, but this one is a very close second. Almost two years ago we sold Jeff's old Tacoma truck and bought our friend Matt's larger Tundra truck, to make room for little Elsie and her car seat. Jeff still wanted a truck at the time, and I must say it came in handy a few times over the past 17 months, camping, transporting bikes, and a few Home Depot runs. Despite that, having a large V8 truck as a driver in Southern California is not the best idea. Since we're leasing my Prius, we're capped on the number of miles we can put on it, so we needed another fuel efficient car that we owned as a back-up, especially for the road trips to San Jose.

We were initially set on the Prius C to replace the truck, but luckily my brother is a car aficionado and steered us away from it, citing bad reviews and a particularly persuasive negative Consumer Reports review. So we continued to look at other cars in the same class, wanting to keep it small but not too small, fuel efficient, and let's be honest- cool. I've always liked the Mazda3 hatchbacks, because I really like the new small Lexus hatchback and the Subaru Impreza hatchback, and this one kind of looks like them but is more affordable. And it got the coveted two Jan thumbs up!

Long post short, we got it! We found one with a manual transmission (my preference) and the model we wanted at a dealership close by, and they were able to work out an acceptable trade with the truck to seal the deal.

Can't wait to cruise her up to the Bay Area!