marm-ville

Last week I mentioned my weird, flawed, sinful aversion to owning a minivan. As I mentioned in that post, owning a minivan would make me feel incredibly marmish, and with my cardigan-love I am already too close to marm-ville for comfort. I will ride in one all day long (comfy, logical, and efficient; I'll give them that); however, I don't want to buy one. Tons of my friends drive minivans--and love them--but I still fear them. I just know what so many people have told me: Once you go minivan, you never go back. 

So of course, after I brought up my aversion to them, one showed up in my driveway last Friday. (And it was too close to the garage for my comfort...)

Before I explained that it was a church van we were using for a weekend trip, TONS of people congratulated me for biting the bullet, saying I'd love it and, of course, never go back to a regular car.

I can't say that I fell head over heals for a minivan this weekend, but I can definitely see where they might be useful. Just not cute. 

And maybe that's my hangup. Minivans are not cute. THIS IS GOING TO BE A VERY SHALLOW STATEMENT: I don't feel cute driving a minivan. I'm not sure why that is important to me, because I rarely dress cutely or do anything else that real cute girls do, but this minivan thing has me running scared. (As a side note, minivans definitely lack some of the street cred I've been going for.)

I can get over that fear if necessary.

And so I come to you, my huge audience, for advice. Let me lay it out for you:

• My SUV, which I LOVE, is awesome. It's the type of car I will never get to drive again, and I don't want to give it up...BUT it has almost 200K miles on it, and we need to think about buying a different family car. 
• Here's what we need: Reliability, great gas mileage, large capacity, ease of use, a powerful engine, and safety. And cuteness, obviously. 
• I were to choose a dream-large-family-car-on-a-pastor's-income (because we will soon be a somewhat large family when C comes home, and you never know what will happen after she gets here...), it would be a Toyota Highlander Hybrid. That is an SUV, folks, and it meets all of our "needs." More specifically, it is a cute SUV. :o)
• We will NOT be getting a loan to buy a car (Dave Ramsey rules.), so we need to purchase this vehicle as wisely/cheaply as possible. 

Where do we go from here? Do you all buy used cars off of Craigslist or from dealers only? Any other great deals on cars that we should know about? Any thoughts on the type of vehicle we should get? I am open to minivans, but we must all agree that they are not cute. (Friends who drive them, YOU are still cute. Keep it up being cute.)

**UPDATE** I escaped Marm-vile by the skin of my teeth when we bought a "not minivan." Details here.