s e v e n i s a j o u r n e y

So now that I am living in the city and don’t need a car, I’ve bought one. Spent pretty much half of today test driving various things and settled on — what a surprise — an Echo. Actually, it’s a Vitz, which is what they call them in Japan, which is where this one is from (2000 used, 45K Km, which works out to ~28K miles — it’s got the sweetest teeny little pic of a young Japanese couple stuck on the vanity mirror, which I hope they miss when they’re giving it its final spruce-up). Here’s a photo I took of it while I was out test driving it, along with a partial pan of the view from Seaview, where the pic was taken — Seaview is at the top (north end) of the harbor, near the mouth of the Hutt. Wellington is the patch of dandruff in the middle right. The darker blob of green in the foreground middle left is Soames Island, with the harbor entrance just left (east) of it. The hills at the far left have the expensive “suburb” of Eastbourne on the harbor side of them, and Wainuiomata and the Coast Road on their far side.

So as you can see, it’s a silver hatchback — sedans are like hens teeth here. The models that come new to NZ are like the one I had back in Boston, with manual everything and not many bells and whistles (no passenger side airbag !). The Japanese imports like this one have more features — power mirrors and windows, ABS brakes, rear wiper, automatic climate control, etc. It’s also got this wacky digital display (still in that center mount, of course) that looks like it’s set waaayy down far away, so you don’t have to change your focal length as drastically between it and the road. Weird. We’ll see how well the digital display holds up — the one in the Taurus gradually faded into inscrutability (but that was an LCD, and this looks like it’s an LED, so.) The hatchbacks don’t seem to have rear speakers, which is a pity, but the sound out of the front ones is nice. It’s a 1.3 liter engine (sedans are 1.5), but it had no trouble billy-goating its way up Horokiwi, so that’s cool. The hatches *do* have frikkin huge blind spots, but the wing mirrors are good, so I can get used to that. They’re quite a bit shorter than the sedans, so the less-than-ideal rear visibility doesn’t hamper parallel parking at all.

Just an aside: as I was sitting in the car there at Seaview, eating a piece of carrot cake and drinking some tea, an old guy in a ball cap and a purple jacket walked in front, walking his dog, and he looked so much like my grandfather (although I don’t recall Grampa ever wearing purple) that I started to cry. Funny how these things hit you of a sudden.

Anyway, I’m supposed to pick the car up tomorrow, provided I can do the money dance on my lunch hour and get the cash for it into my account.

Finally, for the heck of it, here’s a night shot from my balcony: