It was love at first sight. When I first saw a Ford Flex at the Minneapolis Auto Show in 2009, it was the first time in my life I got excited about a vehicle of any type.
Let’s be clear. I drive trucks. I learned to drive in a full-size Chevy Blazer. You don’t see too many 16-year old girls showing up for their driving tests in one of those! When I kept running it into the sides of my parents’ garage, telephone poles (I might be the only person to every hit the same telephone pole twice in the same accident), and other cars, my dad decided to downsize me to a Ford Bronco II. When I got married, I rolled our very first new vehicle – another Blazer – on icy roads. Always the overachiever, I managed to not only roll it, but land it back on the wheels. The insurance adjuster couldn’t believe I wasn’t seriously hurt. I hated the Dodge Durango, loved the Cadillac Escalade, and after the Pilot, thought I’d never own anything else.
But then the kids got bigger and the Pilot wasn’t enough. Since I drive in the city, I didn’t want a full-size truck, but I needed ROOM and I wanted a vehicle that could pull a trailer. Maybe it would have to be a small trailer, but by the time the kids were in middle school, we knew we wanted to start traveling.
Wandering through the Auto Show, it was like the lights of heaven were shining on the Flex. Here was a car MADE for road trips – multiple skylights, optional refrigerator, extra wide seats for carrying kids and dogs; and, my favorite, a built-in inverter to provide my lap-top with unlimited power while traveling, made it seem like the Flex was actually begging me to take it on a trip. I was smitten.
Never one to make a rash decision, or to buy a brand-new model of anything, we waited. We researched. We waited some more. Finally the day came, over two years later, when we were able to begin looking for a used model of the very car we knew we wanted. We knew the features we were looking for and the color we wanted. We test drove and we searched and we prepared ourselves for a long wait for the salesman to find us exactly what we desired. And then it happened. My parents happened to drive by a dealership that had exactly what we were looking for and called us to take a look.
Two hours later I was driving off the lot and our love affair with Lewis had begun.
