My First New Car

9/21/04 - Car Shopping Continues
I realized last night that it was approaching the very end of the year for the Chevrolet Trailblazers and if we had decided on that vehicle, then we should act relatively quickly to find one of the remaining ones that fit our criteria. So today we drove up to Beaverton to do some shopping and start looking at Trailblazers in earnest.

Carr Chevrolet indicated that they had several to choose from, but when we got there, there was really only one that was both an EXT and an LT with a sunroof. The salesman kept calling it a moonroof which was confusing and the color of the truck was white (the color my wife wants, but not a favorite color of mine).

When we got to talking about money the salesman mentioned that he thought they were still having a 25% off sale on the 2004 Trailblazers. That sounded very good to me. When we sat down at the bargaining table, they did come up with a pretty good price but were not willing to give us very much for our Toyota 4Runner. After some negotiating we decided to give them a check to hold the car for us for a few days while we looked into other financing and decided about trading in our Toyota. It was after 9PM when we left, very tired and rather frustrated with the negotiations and stall tactics at that new car dealer.

9/22/04 - Anybody Got A Car For Sale?
I did some calling around today to several other Chevrolet dealers to see what 2004 Trailblazers they either had in stock or could locate for us. Several said they could find us one but there were also a few that had several in stock for us to look at. They also said they would give us a bit more in trade in value and at least nearly match Carr's price.

This afternoon I created and posted a few web pages on my about-the-web.com website about some of the Sportron products and network marketing opportunity. I then bid on a few hundred Google Adwords at a nickel each. We'll have to see how it works, but the theory is good I think.

Our New Chevrolet Trailblazer

9/23/04 - A New Trailblazer
Today we went to Russ Chevrolet in Tigard who had a 2004 Trailblazer Northface edition I was very interested in seeing. It is the most deluxe Trailblazer and it was a light silver color which both my wife and I like. She however did not really like all the extra appointments, and I did not like the seats or the extra money they were asking for it. Their trade in allowance was not satisfactory either. The real deal killer was the fact that the SUV had a CD changer in it (which they were charging $250 more for) and we wanted them to swap it with the stock CD and cassette player, which they wanted almost $1000 extra to do.

So next we drove over to Wilsonville Chevrolet who had located exactly what we were looking for and had it delivered moments before we arrived at 5PM. After a short test drive (this was our fourth) we got down to negotiating. After filling out a few papers they spent perhaps five minutes coming to a price that seemed very fair for both of us. They wanted about $1000 more than Carr but were willing to give us $1500 more for our trade-in. We decided that was good enough for us and struck the deal.

9/24/04 - Goodbye Faithful 4Runner
We cleaned out the Toyota today and then drove it for the last time to Wilsonville where we traded it in for our new 2004 Trailblazer. They were most accommodating and even found an additional $1000 that they could add to the other $6000 worth of incentives, which made the SUV even more affordable. So we wound up with a silver 2004 Trailblazer EXT LT with leather 8-way power seats, dual zone automatic heating and cooling system, 4 wheel drive, a transfer case that can be shifted into neutral (which is great for towing the truck behind our new motorhome), a sunroof, a CD/cassette combo stereo, and lots of other great features.