BMW Stands for "Bliss Must Wait"

After his dad died, Tom inherited his father's 1989 Ford F-150 mega-truck. While the car has relatively few miles on it, it looks like hell -- partly due to Peter's... well, to his inexperience with driving such a monstrosity and his wayward and naive belief that once you're scraping anyway, you should just pull through instead of back up (don't make me think about it!), and partly due to the moss (yes, MOSS) that's literally growing on it. This truck looks like hell and gets gas mileage to match -- 11 MPG. And that's always 11 MPG, whether on the freeway or a back road, whether hauling a heavy boat or completely empty.

Eleven frikkin' miles per gallon! At $3.60 a gallon, times two big ol' tanks, and we're talking big time inefficiency, stupidity... and redneckery.

So we've been looking at cars. While we don't need a soccer-mom van anymore and we don't want a huge truck anymore (handy as it was), we still want some towing capacity (for that tent trailer I'm gonna want someday) and we still want enough room go on trips, and with these Northwest winters and our proximity to the ski slopes, we definitely need four wheel drive.

This is what we're looking at -- it's a 2004 BMW x3. Anyone have any experience with it? We like the ride a lot and it seems to have good reviews and, believe it or not, the price is more reasonable than a lot of other mid-size SUVs. We almost bought one tonight, but just weren't positive and we always like to sleep on big decisions like this. Plus, we have a feeling the deals are gonna get even better if we wait a bit.

Yeah, there's that side of me that wants a new toy NOW, but I'm also finally learning (at 51) the virtue of patience.