2026 - Car Delivery (and purchase) - Inspection of Torrance House

We have made crazy driving trips out of delivering and picking up cars before...

• 2022: Flew out to CA to pick up Curiosity and drive her back to Dallas...
• 2019: Drove Jake's CHR out to him in Seattle (a 2,100 mile, 3-night trip).  

This was a quick trip to CA & back to buy a new RAV and deliver our current one to Bryan & Sian.  They have been sharing a Prius since getting married in 2019, and with a baby on the way, they need another (bigger) car!

I found out that a former co-worker, Doug Eroh, is the president of Penske.  He & I worked on the "Associate Engagement Team" together.  I reached out to him and he hooked me up with Daniel Nono who helped us get one of the first new model '26 RAV Woodland's.  This one came from the Region with just 55 miles on it - everything we were looking for and then some.

We headed out right after attending Garrett & Jenny's housewarming party.  They just purchased a beautiful new home in Cedar Park.  

The drive to Junction, TX took about 3 hours with the sunset right in front of us, and darkness when we arrived, but it gave us a good head start.

Our next FULL day was through the rest of Texas & New Mexico to Tucson, AZ.  On our way we saw super blooms in NM!

Meals for the day included leftover Jia-Jiang Mien for lunch at a rest stop, and leftover Babe's BBQ at our hotel (Best Western's "Spring 20%" off deal for every night! 😂).

Side-bar on Babe's...we visited Lockhart on Friday with Roland & Viv - we all have to say that it is THE BEST BBQ in TX!!!

We rushed through that 11+ hour drive day so that we could make it to OC by dinner with Mom & Larry & Dee Dee.  Everything worked out smoothly...we arrived early enough (gained 2 hours in one day!) to drop off some things for storage at Larry's and shower up. 

This was the first year we took over doing my mom's taxes, so we spent some time at her place reviewing the results and then had YUMMY Chinese food at Tasty Garden.

We were up at the crack of dawn to wash the RAV for hand-over...there were so many bugs from our drive over, it took a while to scrub it down!  Then we were off to Torrance to do an inspection of our house.  We had been expecting that over 9+ years of renting things would be looking pretty shabby, and sure enough it looked pretty bad 😞  There will be a lot of work required to put it in a decent place for us to move back in.  The pictures don't show the extent of it...all of the walls are pretty badly worn & drawn on...there's even silly string in the skylight wells!

So our disappointment in the house was buoyed by seeing Bryan & Sian - 5 more weeks until the baby is due!  Longo Toyota is only 25 miles from their place, but it took us over an hour to get there (not looking forward to going back to LA traffic!).  Since the whole transaction was completed online, it was a pretty quick and easy visit to pick up the new Woodland, "Woody".  

The kids treated us to Summer Rolls, a tasty Vietnamese place in Rosemead, and then Barry & I headed for Vince's in Ontario to pick up take-out for our next night's dinner, LOL...we will stop at a Vince's any time we are near one - we miss the one in Torrance dearly.

When we reached Anthony, NM the next night we were too tired to heat up Vince's - I found a hole-in-the-wall taco place (Taqueria San Isidro) in town where we enjoyed Quesabirria Tacos!  We made it home to enjoy our Vince's the next night.

Here is what our drive looked like - 5 nights and 2,683 miles!