It’s become obvious for a while that we were going to need to upgrade the trusty ol’ family hauler for quite a while so today’s fun included doing some test drives of candidate vehicle. (Eagle-eyed readers will probably deduce that this revelation came during the trip to Washington for Alexander’s surgery…you know the one where we’re counting four seats in the Escape to seat five people. Thanks for the assist, Gramps!).
Test drives are fun…you know, the sort of fun where you’re hauling two car seats into a minivan in weather conditions that could be described as VFR (visual flight rules) and hotter than {insert name of hot and unpleasant underworld here!}. Depending on the model you’re testing, you can even have the added bonus of mooning the entire showroom (I’d like to toss out a mea culpa to those customers at the Honda dealer in North Raleigh).
Of course, when testing minivans with the drop-down DVD screen, you need some test fodder if you don’t want to be stuck with 1,001 Uses for a Minivan promo material. So we slipped a copy of Bob the Builder into the diaper bag to keep Nicholas happy whilst we meandered about the greater metropolitan Raleigh area.
First up was a Honda and well, I’ve already apologised to their customers once. It was surprising that the Odyssey would essentially rule itself out of contention so easily and it wasn’t just because my panoramic posterior makes it a lot harder to install Nicholas’ car seat into the third row. We were quite surprised to find that there just weren’t a whole lot of LATCH (anchor/tether) positions in the third row. The only one would could find was on the 60 part of the 60/40 split bench and there wasn’t one on the middle seat in the second row in the eight-passenger configuration. Given that it’s not uncommon for us to move five passengers (two of which are in big car seats), that would effectively rule out dropping the entire third row into the wheel well to create cargo space.
So now it’s time to visit Toyota and see what their eight-passenger Sienna has to say for itself. We were pleasantly surprised to find LATCH anchors for all three seats in the middle row and three positions in the 60/40 bench in the third row (including one that is only on the 40 portion of the bench). And the second row is comfortable enough for the five of us to go where we need to go and still have a ton of cargo room when the third row folds into the floor. This particular Sienna had the oversized DVD screen…nope, we’ll take the regular-sized screen because it’s just not fun trying to use the rear-view mirror when that big monstrosity blocks the view! Meanwhile, Nicholas is happily enjoying his DVD (we didn’t have any sound but he didn’t seem to care).
So we finish driving and are duly impressed by the Sienna (and fortunately the second row seat can be flipped forward to prevent any unwanted and unintended reasons to hear Carolina Moon Keep Shinin’) but now it’s time to head over to Triangle Towne Centre to let Nicholas run off some energy and get some dinner. He actually falls asleep on the way home.
The next day, we’re heading out to visit A Southern Season with Grammy and let her get a feel for the Sienna and you just had to know what the first question out of Nicholas’ mouth was going to be as he was being strapped into his car seat.
Bob?!?
The look on his face was priceless…he was looking up where the DVD screen was in the Sienna expecting that the Escape would magically get one there as well…and was somewhat confused that he didn’t see the DVD player there! We couldn’t help but laugh at just how clever a boy he was…and be sure that when it’s time to go get the Sienna, it’s definitely going to have that drop-down DVD player. I don’t think the boy would ever let us forget the most important feature…at least according to him! 🙂