Welcome, Sakura! Farewell, Sophia!

This morning as we were clearing off our car from this weekend's crazy storm (over 2 feet!), Richard gave me an impish smile and said, "there's something I have to tell you!" The big news was that our new car/Christmas present, Sakura, was en route to Alexandria from Richard's parents house! Side note: Richard had known this was coming for a whole week and did a really good job keeping it a secret from me - way to go, Rich! He is usually really bad at keeping secrets!

Only a few hours later, Sakura came in all her glory (well, there is a small part of her that is NOT glorious, but we will get to that later).

With Sakura's arrival came a sad farewell to our BMW Sophia, our wonderful companion and friend, and our primary mode of transportation since our wedding. We will miss you, Sophia!



Here is Barry, who volunteered to drive to and from Utah to bring us our new baby. We love Barry (and not only because he often travels cross-country to bring us goodies), and were happy to see him, if only for a few minutes.



The last thing we had to do before the switch could be complete was to turn in our old keys for our new ones:





Except, as it turns out, Sakura actually doesn't need keys, as she doesn't have an ignition... you turn her on by pressing this handy button:



Okay, now onto the bad news. As soon as Sakura came into view for the first time, Richard said, "Emmy, you are going to not be happy in about 7 seconds." And oh boy, was he right. Upon closer inspection, I realized that Sakura has UTAH UTES plates! (To my U of U friends who are reading this, don't take this paragraph too seriously.) Needless to say, this will motivate us to change over the plates to Virginia plates VERY quickly. Luckily, when we were doing a final check through of Sophia, I found my BYU hat, so I could take this photo to express my emotions:



All in all, though, we are very happy with Sakura! She is a 2009 Nissan Altima in black. Look how awesome Rich looks in the driver's seat!


Welcome to the family, Sakura! Love, Richard, Emily, Bertha and Kitty

PS- Here's the back story for Sakura's name: Sakura means "Cherry Blossom" in Japanese, and since Nissan is a Japanese company, and Washington DC has the famous Cherry Blossom festival each spring, it was the perfect fit!