Tag Archives: North Carolina

Errant Literary

Car Hunting (part 5)

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Car Adventures (part 4)

I’m almost to the finish line.

I got some helpful input from my relatives on which cars they had good opinions of. After reviewing my options I have finally settled on the 2020 Chevy Bolt EV.

The Bolt gets 259 miles of range with a 66kWh battery. It has all the technology I am looking for with Android Auto, a nice console screen, a backup camera, and safety features.

2020 Chevy Bolt EV

I found a nice dealership in Virginia that will be able to deliver the vehicle to me for $300. There are processing fees of $699 plus the cost of the vehicle itself, which is $16,000. The EV Tax credit will help a bit next year.

I have $11.5k in the bank and I have a one-year, 0% Balance Transfer offer on my US Bank Altitude GO card. I can probably get another 4-5k from that card without pushing the minimum payments too high.

My limit is 9k for that card and the BT fee would be about $199 for a $4,000 transfer. I am also getting 3k from my father as an early graduation gift.

So that should be about $18.5k available to cover the cost of the purchase plus registration fees. I will also need to get the car added to the household insurance policy. I was added to the policy earlier this year as a requirement to take the NC driving test.

I had dithered some time on getting a Kia Niro PHEV which has excellent mileage. The main problem I ran into with the Niro’s was that most were priced at 20k+ and often had 60-100k miles on them. I didn’t want to get something that was nearing the end of its life (or midlife).

2019 Kia Niro PHEV

I will be losing the larger trunk space that the Niro (19.4 ft³) has to offer if I go with the Bolt (16.9 ft³), but I think that is an acceptable trade-off if I can get a vehicle with 20-30k miles on it instead.

Another car I was looking at was the Nissan LEAF. The dealership only had the SV model (40kWh) available and I really wanted a Plus model which has a larger 62kWh battery. The trunk in the LEAF is much bigger (23.6 ft), this is despite having the wheel wells constricting the space.

2019 Nissan LEAF (SV)

So for now I am just getting my funds together to make the purchase. If a LEAF Plus shows up before I make the call, then I may switch to that vehicle instead. Otherwise, I expect to be driving sometime in May.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate your taking the time to be here. If you have any questions or comments for me, be sure to leave them below, and have a great day!

Errant Literary, Travel

Car Adventures (part 2)

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Car Adventures (part1)

Yesterday I went to the Raleigh-Durham airport to pick up my mother after her trip to Portugal. I was doing fairly well, I thought, right up until I accidentally exited off of the highway exit to Aviation Parkway.

What followed was a confusing mess. I found myself once again in Brier Creek. I had the presence of mind this time around to find a turnaround right away, rather than going off into the sticks out of town.

I got back on the road that led to the airport, and there was this red sports car ahead of me that seemed to be in a hurry I incorrectly assumed they were also heading to the airport, so I followed them.

Unfortunately, they were going to Durham.

Once more I exited off of Aviation Parkway and now I was heading to Durham. Luckily, I noticed a turn-off that was marked Raleigh.

This spun me around quite a bit and I ended up in a section of orange cans and traffic cones as construction was underway all over the roadway.

I slowly followed the road signs while this old car behind me kept revving its engine. I thought that they were maybe impatient, but as we rolled up to a stop light I heard their engine stall and stop.

The other car managed to start up again and the driver pulled off the roadway. It was a very old car.

Once the light went green I pulled away and left the old beater by the wayside. Following the cones I eventually found myself on a northbound route to Raleigh.

Some way down the road there was another exit to Aviation Parkway, which I happily took. This was sort of good but by this point, I had already overshot the airport by a great distance, and I was now traveling south.

At this point, I knew I needed some help. I pulled over to the side of the road and checked my map.

For today’s trip, I had the good sense to bring an old phone that had Google Maps on it. It doesn’t have a SIM card, but the GPS worked enough that it could pinpoint my position after a few minutes. It doesn’t work for real-time navigating but I could at least see where I was concerning the airport.

After I got my bearings, I found a street where I could do a U-turn and I got myself headed back north. I was close enough now to the airport that I could see the big black signage indicating the terminals.

I had intended on using the Cell Phone Lot at RDU as a waiting area until my mother’s flight had landed. I got lost trying to follow the directions I had written down and I gave up and instead used the parking garage.

Most of the floors were listed as OPEN in green letters on the electronic board, but when I started climbing up the round tower thing, each entrance was blocked with signage saying it was full.

I did manage to find a spot on the 4th floor, quite far from the elevators.

Once I had parked, I took some time to breathe and congratulate myself for surviving the trip. The trip back was much easier as I had my knowledgeable mother with me in the car and she knows these streets very well.

While I was at the airport I took some pictures of the planes and the facility.

Questions or comments, put them below. Thanks for reading!

Errant Literary

My First Car Adventure

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Yesterday, I drove my mother to the airport for her vacation trip to Portugal. I drove her car there and back, a round trip of 70 miles on the fast expressway.

The journey there was relatively simple with my mother’s guidance. However, the return journey turned out to be a challenge.

Everyone was driving so fast (70 MPH), so I decided I would hang out in the rightmost lane and go a bit slower. Unfortunately, I realized too late that I was on a Right turn-only exit off of the highway much too early.

I ended up stuck in Briercreek, just outside of a subdivision, and lost inside a shopping area. It took me twenty minutes to finally figure out how to get back to the highway.

Not only had I never been to that part of the state, but I also had a clamshell-styled feature phone that could not use apps. I had no map to base my decisions on or a robotic voice to guide me to the highway entrance.

It was a game of eliminations. I managed to drive all the way outside of the shopping area and out into the suburbs where I turned around and backtracked my route.

I made several wrong turns until finally, I began to see intersections that looked vaguely familiar.

I’m not sure when it happened, but I realized that the exit from the expressway should also be close to the entrance back onto it.

Once I understood that I was able to make my way back to the exit but from the other side of the road. Sure enough, I could see the big blue sign marking the entrance to the 540 highway.

After I got back on I had no qualms with “going fast,” and I kept to the center lane the rest of the way home. It took me two hours to get home instead of one.

When I get my car, later this year, I will get one with onboard navigation. I swear this will never happen again.

Car Adventures (part2)

Errant Literary

Lockdown

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Update: When I wrote this, my employer had said there was a lockdown. There is not currently.

I just received an official-looking document to carry stating that I am an essential person doing something important. Basically, I am allowed to go to work. I am allowed to leave my house.

I live in North Carolina currently, and the governor has issued a lockdown due to Corona-chan (Covid-19).

I was hoping to get paid to stay home so that I could grind a bit more on the Hardcore server. Yesterday I only managed to get 40 favor. I ran Tempest Spine and the two Dragonborn quests.

Ananzi is up to level 15, and I expect to farm Sharn on normal to get my Esoteric set items. That should give me an edge when I work on the 11’s and 12’s.

Brioche is still level 9, I am focusing on the Favor reward before trying to hit 10 reaper points, just in case I die again.