Finding the smallest car that's big enough.

A few years ago I heard Click and Clack give advice on buying a car that's stuck with me. They said "Buy the smallest car that's big enough." Don't buy the Mini Cooper when you really need a sedan and don't buy the Ford Excursion when all you need is the Toyota Highlander.

So now as I go shopping for minivans I'm trying to figure out what's type of space I want to live in for a year. I've looked at a couple including the Honda Oydssey and (more seriously) at the Sienna and they seem to be al lbe the same size, a bigger than I need. But all the other's I've looked at seem too small.

I'm torn cause I don't know if I know what I need. (Isn't that always the case?)

The from their website the Dodge Caravan looks like it's about a foot and a half smaller than the Toyota and Honda so I'm going to take a look at that.

Course with all this trying to sort through size I'm beginning to wonder again if I really want to buy new or nearly new. All depends on how long I'm going to have it. But the differences in the prices between new and one up to 3/4 years old is practically non-existent. I've gone back and forth about five times today alone between new and >5 years old and I'm back to leaning towards new, (that is a new '06).

Just hoping I can still get a new '06 in three or four months when I'm actually ready to buy something.

As I'm finally at the shopping for a minivan stage I find I'm telling more and more people about my plans to take off a year. It's creeping up on me. A while ago I created an excel spreadsheet to sort through all my expected income and expenses and figure out where to where to invest my money. On Jan 1 I'm going to switch the box labeled "months till leaving" to 6. Crazy. Seems like it was just 8 months. 8 months seems further away than just 6 months plus two months. It's closer to one year than 0 years and seems so far off. In one month I'll have less than a half a year to go.

This is all an estimate anyway, I may leave earlier or later, and I just needed an estimate for all my little equations, but It's not going to be much later than that and I still have so many things to do before I leave. Mostly involving learning how to do radio pieces which has been stalled for the last 6 months by my crap computer. I can't believe how much time I've wasted trying to get that thing to work. That's over 25 weekends of 25 hours of sitting in the studios at Clear Channel without actually getting anything done. I only took that job last Feb. because I wanted the time to work on my own projects, (well, and because I needed a job.)

Alright, no more complaining about my computer. Enough of you have heard this rant in person.

As this trip approaches though I'm getting more and more concern about one thing. I feel like I don't have true plan yet of what I want to do. I don't want to plan too much, of course, but I wish I had some sort of overarching goal or idea that the trip can be semi-structured around. I guess I want to finish with some meaning attached to the trip. Something you could write a book around. If it's just a series of interesting but unrelated events then what would be the point of taking a full year off to do them?

Probably not something I need to worry about. Partly I think I feel this way because the longest trip I've ever taken on my own was a month and a half. I'm not worried about finding a year's worth of stuff to do, I'm just worried about not doing things that are worth it. Or worth reading about in a blog...