Greetings, my fellow port swillers!

Regular friends of the decanter will recall that ol’ Robbo has from time to time posted here about the Honda Odyssey (known as the Juggernaut®) which for the last three years has transported the Port Swiller family hither and yon.  Well, as of yesterday said Juggernaut® has returned to her Maker, the lease having run out, and no doubt even now is being prepared to reappear on some used car lot somewhere.  (Although I dunno, come to think of it.  Mrs. R ran up about 75K miles altogether.  At what point do they just scrap a returned leaser for parts or send it to some third world country?)

I must say that she was a good ride – roomy, practical and didn’t give us the slightest bit of mechanical trouble in all the time we had her.  (Of course, I say this as a nearly middle-aged father of teenagers.  Fifteen or twenty years ago, the mere idea of a minivan would have set me retching.)  The only problem we had – and it was a big one – is that she handled like damn-all in slick conditions (rain, ice, snow, etc.).  All that weight sitting behind the front-wheel drive acted like a ginormous pendulum, and especially this last winter Mrs. R got downright jittery about trying to venture out it her.

So, what to do.  We felt that, in order to prevent sororicide, it was critical to keep that third row.  OTOH, we also felt it was important to go back to an optional 4WD.  Our solution?  Yesterday, Mrs. Robbo bought a brand new Honda Pilot, which I will here and now dub the Juggernaut® – Mark II.

If my memory is right, this is the seventh addition to the Port Swiller Family fleet over the last twenty years.  It was also, at least from my perspective, the easiest. I loathe shopping in general and car shopping in particular and I was dreading being summoned to go sit around the dealership listening to a lot of sales gibberish and then signing a bunch of documents I only half-understand.  However, for whatever reason they didn’t require my co-signature on anything and Mrs. Robbo (who, like most wimminz, enjoys buying things) was able to deal with it on her own.   So she got her car and I got spared a lot of bother.  Everybody wins.

 

*Spot the allusion.