You know, if there’s one thing we’ve learned about being here in the United States for the past couple weeks (a bit earlier than planned, if you recall), it’s that there’s very, very, very, very, very little you can do here without a car.  In every other country we survived just fine on public transportation, even getting between major cities and destinations for the equivalent of a few bucks.  But back here, and especially in a small town north of Dallas, Texas where we are currently kicking it, public transportation is more of an urban legend than a reality.

We’ve been lucky and blessed to have family willing to haul us places and let us borrow their vehicles, but we can’t do that forever, and we’ve got plenty of things we want to do that require us to have our own set of wheels.  And since we’re here in this country for a while, we figured we might as well get our auto searching on now.

The goal was to have a car by the time we started country #12, which “officially” starts today–in fact, our phone still gave us the notification that we’re supposed to be getting on our flight from Costa Rica to Salt Lake City in about an hour. But so far, things haven’t quite worked out.  We’re being picky; we don’t just want a car, we want a manual transmission 3rd-gen 4Runner with 4-wheel drive, a moon roof, good condition interior, a tow hitch, and a roof rack.  As it turns out, finding exactly that is a bit more on the difficult side.

 

We’re sort of awkwardly in a middle area here, not yet capable of doing the things we’ve determined to do for our 12th and final country, but not having the luxury (or desire) to move our official start date.  As much as it might seem nice to calm down and have a break, we are soooo ready to get things going. We want to explore, and show Carter some of the cool things this state (and a few others) have to offer.

It’d be easy enough to lower our standards and just get an acceptable car (perhaps one with better gas mileage), but it’s unfortunately a larger decision than that. We’ve got some exciting future plans that we’re not telling you about yet, and having the right car has a lot to do with making things work.  So we’ll continue the search, and we might have to finagle our dates a little bit to accommodate–but we do promise that this country won’t suck. We’re so excited to do what we’ve got planned, and you should be too… for you’re about to see an America that you’ve never seen before.

And if you happen to have a 4Runner that fits that description, I’d love to make you an offer.