The insanity has to end!

Our UK holidays this year pointed out what a daft situation we were in, with two sports cars, only one of which I could drive. In summer we took BOTH cars down to East Yorkshire so we could take everything we wanted to. Madness! When we went to Skye last month, we just about managed to pack everything into my MX-5, which we can both drive, but it was a real struggle.

Since the MX-5 is the newer car, and since I can't drive the RX-8, it is the latter that has to go. The RX isn't getting driven anyway, because Denise is away travelling so much, and it's a real shame that it's not getting used. So we decided to sell it and get something more practical that can carry Denise's bicycles, and that I can drive when we go on holiday. After a lot of research, we narrowed it down to two cars. A lot were excluded because of personal preferences: neither D nor I like Vauxhalls or Renaults; D doesn't like Fords, and we wanted a change, so that ruled out Mazdas, Peugeots, VWs and Citroens. That didn't leave a lot, so we narrowed our choices down to an Audi A3 or a ... Skoda Fabia VRS estate Well, the "salesman" at Edinburgh Audi put so many obstacles in the way of us buying an A3 that we decided that he thought we were not the sort of people that should be allowed to own an Audi! Round at the Skoda dealership we were treated like family. Decision made. After a test drive (which we didn't have to jump through hoops to arrange - just turned up and they got the demonstrator out for us), we ordered a brand new sporty Fabia VRS Estate for a fraction of the cost of the Audi, and it would arrive, with all our specified factory options, in about half the time that the Audi would have taken.

I just could not fathom the attitude of the Audi salesman: we were prepared to order a new car from him, and he just kept coming up with reasons why it would be difficult. In contrast, the Skoda guy just kept saying "yes" and "that's not a problem" to everything we asked, and not because they were desperate to all cars: they were selling them as fast as they could build them, whether Fabias, Octavias or Superbs.

For such reasonably priced car with such a tiny engine (1.4 Litres), it's very powerful (180 ps), has a nice clever auto gearbox, and a well sorted chassis. Oh, and it gets at least twice as many miles to the gallon as the RX-8! Should arrive end of Feb or early March. Looking forward to it.