Thank you, dear ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger.
I'm very overdue for this but let's try sharing what it was like when bunnyhugger bought her car. It was a hot day, as they all were until the temperature was turned off a week ago, fun because her car's air conditioner was good for about 45 minutes after it started, one of the things that it was too expensive to fix. Also she wasn't sure she had enough gas to get to the dealership, which was near Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum. So she had to stop at the sketchy gas station just before the highway, the one that's been through four(?) identities since I moved to town, and which was in the process of turning from a Sunoco into an Amoco. It's since finished, but it was stuck with inconsistent signage for weeks somehow. Though she meant to put in only a couple dollars she overestimated what she'd need, so she traded in a car with three-quarters of a tank of gas, which, I've been there too.
Though she was buying a Honda, the dealership kept all its used cars at their Toyota sister store. And we learned a smaller building out behind the main dealership with, we were told, maybe better bathrooms. At least from being less-used. I'm not sure there was an important difference.
bunnyhugger's dealer started talking to me as soon as I got back from the bathroom. This made me edge a little bit farther away and look smaller and keep my focus on bunnyhugger, the usual ineffective things I do when I'm pulling focus. He handed the keys to the Insight over to bunnyhugger, though, and gave a quick run-down of car features too fast for her to quite follow. And then just said, you know, take it for a spin, the loose honor-system method of test drives enabled since Covid-19. He photocopied her driver's license; the guy in Battle Creek had just taken a cell phone snap of mine.
She wanted some practice with highway and some with neighborhood driving, and so we set off along the highways and discovered just how close we were to Marvin's. I thought she might turn off there, letting the strip mall streets serve as proxy for neighborhood driving, but she stuck on the Interstates for quite a while. We finally pulled off the highway near Milford, which is about 132 miles from the dealer, but also right near this bird sanctuary where birds will land in your hand because they know you bought seed to feed them. No time for that, although we did pull off next to an old-school Dairy Queen to inspect, like, the car's engine (it had one) and the trunk (it had a full-size spare tire, as the previous owner did not trust the 'patch and re-inflate' kit the car comes with instead of a mini-spare). It was farther than she really meant to go, and on the drive back the dealer did call, he'd said, to ask if we got into an accident or got lost or anything.
An unexpected delightful thing: the car popped up the speed limit, despite not having the satellite navigation package. I read the manual to learn how it does this. There's a camera up front and when it recognizes a speed limit sign, it reads the limit that's correct for passenger cars and pops that up. There's another feature that will pop up any road signs, although I have not seen bunnyhugger using that.
So she was sold on the car. Now to buying it. The last cleaning out of the old car was quick enough; almost everything was out already and most of what we took was, like, loose change still rattling around places. bunnyhugger had her last moments with an old car that had worked very well for her for quite a long while, and we got the plate set on the new.
And then he suggested we go into the main dealership building to wait for the finance guy, rather than sit in the smaller used dealership building and wait for him to lead us to the main building to talk with the finance guy. On the way out I noticed he'd already written up the little window tag with make and model and mileage and such for bunnyhugger's old car, but we were on the move and so I couldn't get a photo of it.
The finance guy was delighted to learn in small talk where bunnyhugger teachers, as he had some very complicated story about his kids doing some kind of sports event up there the next day. Also he expressed his opinion that the university was hopping, which does not match our experience. He did ask how she wanted to finance the car, but she had the Ready-Check made out by MSUFCU and which the dealer seemed to have never seen or heard of before, and he couldn't beat its loan rate. Match, but not beat. So there we were, with a large personal check and a larger Ready-Check and a bunch of signing of things she had a new car.
The dealer returned --- we were now a few minutes past the official close for the day, but suppose that makes it all worthwhile --- and he did another tour, left-to-right, of all the dashboard features, about one in ten of which we retained. That one being what you press to get the key out of the keyless-entry fobs, in case we need to unlock the door and pop the hood so the car can be jump-started.
And then we were ready to take off and ... could only find one of the two sets of keys. We couldn't find the other anywhere. I gave in and asked the dealer if he might have taken it back by accident. No; it turns out that bunnyhugger's travel mug, though it fits in the cupholder, does so with clearance on the bottom that's just big enough for the keys to fit. If we'd tried looking under it we would have found it, but I never imagined there could be anything under it.
And from that we were off, taking the new car home and awestruck and overloaded by our sleepy little house getting two new cars in under a week. But, at least, we could rest confident that the rest of September would be nice and quiet and normal.
How was Cedar Point looking, last time we were there, as the parade finished its final stop? Here's pictures.
The parade is over and now we start the celebratory show. While they count down 1 - 5 - 0 on the monitor a few little fireworks shoot off from behind the stage and in front of Iron Dragon.
Part of the stage show, containing a terrible threat against our dear pet rabbit! Also one of the many 80s songs used in the parade and show that mentioned the 50s and 60s and 70s and 90s as music periods but left the 80s as the implicit background.
In the loosely organized historical review they get to 1921 and the construction of what would become Cedar Downs. The two floats move and spun around some, with the riders on each horse, to suggest some of the action and fun there. Note there's a Cedar Downs(?) picture on the elliptical screen in back.
And here's a good view of 'Grandma' riding her Cedar Downs horse.
From the 40s music segment, a replica Andrews Sisters perform to show what kind of music you could see in shows at the park then.
And at last, it's poodle skirt time!
Trivia: The world's largest bell was cast in 1733 in Moscow, and weighed over a thousand pounds. It never rang, as it was broken by fire before it could be struck. Source: Know-It-All, A J Jacobs.
Currently Reading: Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, Marcia Chatelain.
