Load Up!

Back when we first got the Subaru, we knew that we'd appreciate its spacious interior, should we ever add a third party to the human portion of the family.

What we didn't realize was that the spacious interior wouldn't actually be spacious enough for two adults, one infant, and one 70lb pigbull and all our stuff.  Not for multi-day trips, anyway.  Or, rather, it's spacious, but not comfortable.  Especially for the pigbull, crammed in the cargo area as she is.  And there's no room for us to change a diaper in the shelter of the car.  Or get to anything with anything resembling convenience.

A few weeks back my brother and co came for a visit, and when they pulled up I noticed that their Subaru was sporting a fancy new cargo box (they have one less pigbull, but one extra kid, soooo...)

"That's frigging brilliant!" I yelled, possibly before I even said, "Hello!"

They left, and I started researching.  And then I started prowling for the best deals.  And then, because we have a long trip up to Lara's coming super soon, I decided it was time to eschew deals and just take advantage of my REI dividends (which were, um, embarrassingly high this past year).

So we declared today, "Going into Portland Day" (yes, it's become an Event.  Blame the extreme increase in traffic over the past decade) and then Nathan casually mentioned that Chick-fil-A has branch in Clackamas, not too far from the REI, and our plans were solidified.

 We got a super-nice salesperson to help us out, and since he was normally a rock-climbing guy, he was pretty thrilled that we'd already done all of our research, and only needed help wrangling our box of choice out to/on top of the car.

(Of course, there was a minor debacle with the one we purchased having a key snapped off in the lock... he was mortified, and then extremely grateful by how chill we were about it.  "Some people wouldn't be," he said.  "Yeah, well, some people are jerk faces," I said, wondering who in their right mind would pitch a fit about something like that.  They literally just brought us out a new one, didn't even make us stand in line to "return" it.)

This is the face of a husband who is wondering why the heck I'm taking a photo of him installing a cargo box.  Or possibly he is gauging my size and comparing it to the interior volume.  Hmmm...

There had been conflicting reports on Teh Interwebz as to whether or not the one we wanted would still allow the hatch to open all the way, but it totally does.  Woo!

So we drove off into the noon-day sun, having rendered ourselves even more PNW as frick.  I can't wait to put it to use next week!

Bonus adorable baby photo.

adf