Our car - Grey Gracie

This is our car, our grey Mazda CX-7 that has come with us all the way across the Atlantic ocean. We bought her (yes it is a her, all cars like boats are female always) the first week that we moved to Alabama. Being car-less in Alabama is just not an option at all. We had a rental car the first week but that quite quickly becomes expensive so one of our first priorities was to buy our selfs a car. C had done quite a lot of research and thinking about different cars already before we moved to the US. He really is into cars so this was something that he gave a lot of thought. I also remember the trouble about moving to the US when we did not have any kind of credit history and how we were getting totally outrageous credit offers. In the end we decided that the smartest thing was to use our savings that we had and try to build a credit history as soon as possible.

So we bought Grace. Yes that is her name. We have always had the tradition to give our cars names where the first letter starts with the same letter as the color of the car. So that is why it became Grace because she is grey. Grey Grace :-)

She has been with us all over the south and now she is here with us in Sweden and for the first time covered with both snow and frost. She is doing very well here and she has no problem with the great amounts of snow with her snow tires on and being a four-wheel drive car. We feel very safe driving her.

She does not miss the bumpy roads of Alabama and the pot holes both on the smaller roads as well as all the ones on I-65. However, she gets very dirty here with all the snow. But C takes very good care of here, washing her every other week or so. In Alabama cars just don´t get dirty the way the do here. Even if it rains heavily there it still is not the same as the snow and the slush that really makes cars so dirty here during winter months.

Our Alabama "A" is very nice to have even if we never turned out to be big fotball

fans. American fotball is just so complicated and neither one of us is very interested in watching sports on tv. So mostly we got the A just because it stands for Alabama. We also figured that if someone from Alabama ever saw this sticker here they would not pass by it silently. At least they would probably smile and exclaim "Roll Tide". In Alabama we had a small Swedish flag instead and sometimes we happened to see other cars with Swedish flags and it is a great way to run into other Swedes just like the A here would be a good way to run into someone from Alabama.

We had to buy a new navigator. The one that we had in the US just did not want to be with us any longer after C had played around with it trying to install the European maps on it from his computer. The screen suddenly turned black and it just died. For a while we hesitated about buying a new one. We first decided that we would not need one as it was possible to down load a free copy of some kind to our smart phones. That navigator worked for a while or at least it worked fine for the short distances that we used it for around Stockholm. We did not use it a lot to be honest. Then when we were driving up north to Sälen and needed a navigator the one that we had down loaded to our phones proved to be completely unreliable. It kept loosing it´s signal and also it just went crazy several times and lead us in all kinds of directions except for the right one. So after the trip to Sälen we decided to get a new proper navigator and I am happy we did.
It is just so hard to park here. It seems like parking spot and the garage where we keep Gracie is not made for this kind of car size. It really is not easy to park. I had to spend quite some time practicing before I managed to get into this parking spot. It still makes me nervous the few times I know I will have to park her on my own. It is kind of funny because this is considered a small car in the US and here it just feels huge! When I am out drivning I always look for the parking spots that are located at the end of the parking lots where there are less cars and more space. I rather walk a longer distance than try to squeeze into a tiny parking place. It feel great having her here with us.