Our dear old Toyota Prado was well over 13 years old, it has provided sterling service for all those years but alas, it was starting to get tired and starting to cost serious repair / restoration money. Plus it drank petrol like nobody's business. It was too heavy on the fuel and it was really too large, especially as we now use the ute for most of the lifting and carrying that needs doing - and well, we aren't going to be carting big dogs around anymore.

So we went shopping recently and we settled on a Volkswagen Tiguan. It's a diesel motor (outstandingly quiet) and we were particularly keen to get the most fuel efficient option in a reasonable size - we didn't want another huge big car, but we still do need to do a lot of country driving and we didn't want to go right down to a little car. We picked the Tiguan up in Ballarat this morning, drove home via Maryborough and the supermarket. It has a surprising amount of get up and go - we'll both have to watch a latent tendency to leadfootitis as we could get ourselves into a lot of trouble in this thing.

Off to Melbourne tomorrow in the new car - hopefully we'll get there and back in a lot more comfort than we used to in the ute!