New car and today's walk

So, yes, I've got a new set of wheels. A 2006 Kia Spectra5. Black.

As concisely as possible, here's my saga: Sold the Mini Cooper in February, planned to drive the truck for a year or two to save some dough, bought the Vespa in the summer for an alternate mode and to save gas, the truck's been doing some odd things lately, insurance renewal is coming up, so, thinking now would be a good time to at least look, we went looking. I've sort of had my eye on a Mazda3 wagon; considering cost (I thought), gas mileage, cargo, size, reliability, safety, all that, I thought it would be a great car. Then Brian alerted me to the new 2007 Suzuki SX4, a small wagon, the cheapest AWD on the market. We test drove that, but at a glance I knew it was too compact, I was already a bit hesitant that the mileage was a bit lower than most other small wagons, and the salespeople were, uh, jerks. On to Reno Mazda Kia. Turns out the Mazda3 is only affordable at the low end. A nicely equipped used 2006 model with 8000+ miles was $23K, somewhat more than I was wanting to spend. I had looked into the Kia online anyway, so looked at them. They're very similar to the Mazda, and a brand new one only cost about $17K. And they come with a 10-year, 100,000 mile warranty for the original owner. That's pretty unbeatable. So that, my friends, is what led me to own this:

I can live without AWD.


So, moving right along...took a nice walk out in the hills leading to the Steamboat ditch trail above Patagonia on the west side of town today. Photos from that in the newly added album for now. Also a video from the walk.

One neat thing...I figured out how to burn a VCD from downloaded video clips, watchable on most DVD players. Sort of a poor man's DVD burn. If you wanna hear about it, get in touch.