Minivan Shopping in Arkansas

We looked at some sweet minivans yesterday. That's a sentence I thought I'd never write, a thought I thought for sure would never exist in my head. Well, times change. We are old, we are dorks, we will join the cavalry of minivans and, if we are lucky, we will drive them to Dairy Queen.

We didn't plan on needing a minivan. Maybe no one plans on needing a minivan. It's just something that happens to you.

We visited three dealerships, sat in a bunch of minivans, drove some other minivans, spent a surprising amount of time wondering whether or not a certain used minivan smelled like urine, talked numbers, and said no about eighty-five times. Then we went home without a minivan.

It's hard to buy something when it's really expensive and you don't want to buy it, but you sort of need to buy it. Here's what we want to buy:

2010 GMC Terrain. We talked to Todd at the GMC dealership and he was just the coolest salesguy we talked to all day. He was selling what we wanted to buy, and he was the guy we wanted to buy it from, except that what we wanted to buy was something that just doesn't work for a family of five with two infants and two-year-old. We found ourselves in the classic WANT versus NEED conflict. Which, I don't know about you, but me, I go with what I want like 85% of the time. But in this case....

We asked Todd if he could help us: of course he could! He showed us the GMC Acadia, which is only slightly less awesome than the crucially awesome GMC Terrain. You can definitely fit three car seats in an Acadia. Only problem is that you pretty much would have to squeeze them in sideways to access the third row seat. Maybe even rotate them upside down. Which, to some people, is like a deal-breaker.


Some unknown organ behind my sternum activated itself in sympathetic vibration when Todd fired up the 3.6 liter V6 on the moderately-pimped Acadia he was showing us.

With great personal sadness we walked away from the friendly and knowledgeable Todd and put our dreams of owning either of these finely-crafted machines in a small and sturdy box near our hearts.

We are still in the hunt. For a minivan.