Julie's Boggle

Around Christmas time, we reached the conclusion that we could not practically continue to go on holidays as a family without expanding the family motor. Our little two-door hatchback was packed solid for just a few days up in York over Christmas, and that was a trip we made without our own travel-cot!

Time to move on.

So last weekend, we waved a sad goodbye to the trusty Polo that had served us so well. At 8 years old, it was still in remarkably good nick – but then it did get a lot of time off each year!

Judging by all the attention I got from the online AutoTrader advert I placed, we probably could have asked for more… But anyway, we found our buyer quite quickly so we needed to move with some speed on getting our replacement.

Bearing in mind that we hope to take up our diving again someday, we opted for one of the, er, larger models available. I thought a 7-seater would be about right for the job and we short-listed Volkswagen’s Touran and Vauxhall’s Zafira (that’s Opel for the South African readers).

As it turned out, the CarGiant dealership we visited didn’t have any Tourans that fitted our price, age and mileage specs but there was a Zafira that matched nicely. The only catch was that it had a really smoky smell in it.

We um’ed and ah’ed over that for a while, but a week later, it was still available, nothing better had come up, and the Polo’s buyer was coming to pick it up the next day. So we went back and took it.

And here is “Smokey Joe” – our 2-litre, turbo-diesel, 7-seater Zafira. (Fortunately, the smell isn’t so bad any more!)

It doesn’t have all the fancy features of the higher-end models, but it does have a CD-player, alarm and air-con (less of a necessity here than in SA). And we thought a diesel would be good for fuel-economy.

What we particularly liked about the seat configuration in these cars is the way the two very back seats drop completely into the floor when stowed – leaving PILES of space for the boot, a real treat!

Our first proper trip is going to be to the Isle of Wight (about 2 – 3 hours driving each way) at the end of June. I’m very much looking forward to it, both as a family holiday and now as a chance to test out Smokey Joe with a good long drive!

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 8th, 2008 at 6:56 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.