Well, this week we finally went for it and took advantage of GM's employee discount promotion. We got an Express 12-passenger van, which actually is about the ideal size for us. Although the promotion lasts 3 more weeks, I suspect GM is running out of 2005 inventory. As far as I could tell from their BuyPower website, we got the last big Chevy passenger van within a 200 mile radius.

I'll probably write more about how things go with it later; at least the buying experience was very pleasant. That used to be the worst part of getting a new car!

For years our "big" vehicle has been an Astro, which is sort of a slightly larger minivan. It was good for hauling a lot of small children around, but surprisingly poor at hauling stuff, in my opinion. Anyway, as our kids grew we just outgrew the Astro. Minivans are great for hauling kids (and some of them for hauling stuff) but they don't do such a good job with teens and adults. If you've ever seen a Caravan full of adults, sagging under the load, you know what I mean.

In our case, we've got more kids than will fit in any minivan, but it wasn't usually a problem, since we could fit most of them with one parent or just take two cars (we don't take very many big vacations). A couple of years ago, though, that started getting harder, and this year it seemed like the Astro was suddenly way too small. We could hardly fit half of them in there, comfortably. It wasn't my imagination - Susan's been taking them for checkups and it turns out at least 3 of our boys grew 4 inches this past year!