Last week Catherine and I took a quick trip – approximately 4,000 kilometers down the road from Ontario, but still – to Kelowna, BC, so that we could try out some new cars for our friends at GM Canada, who are nice like that. (Actually, I travelled closer to 6,000 kilometers for this quick trip because I was hanging in my old ‘hood of Halifax when they invited me to drop by for tea and cars in Kelowna. But hey, what’s an 8+ hour commute across 4 time zones when it’s for friends? Easy peasy.)
So we took a jaunt to BC to do a fun test drive and the first thing that blew my mind about this trip was how it was set up just like The Amazing Race. We loooooove The Amazing Race (ed. note: HELL YEAH WE DO) even though all the scenes that take place in airports provoke, for me, extreme anxiety because for me missing a plane is akin to missing an important exam which was, like, my biggest fear before I had a kid. Now I have a child and I worry about missing planes and public potty incidents. It’s a whole new world baby.
Anyway. We arrived at the airport and it turns out there was a large group of us all unwittingly sitting around each other on the same flight and BOOM! GM Canada has lined up a row of kick-butt shiny cars in the parking lot, all with keys in the ignition and they yelled ‘GRAB YOUR CARS AND YOU’RE OFF!‘ which was actually, in reality, more like ‘why don’t you pick a car, adjust the setting for safe driving, and follow one of our GM staffed cars to our appointed meeting place in an orderly, traffic-obeying fashion?‘ But I like how it sounded in my head better.
So I grabbed a pretty black Buick Regal and adjusted the mirrors and seat settings to ‘short and wee’ and drove.
Next thing that I noticed was that for the first time in the history of working with GM Canada — and we have been working with them since 2006 — is that they gave us a big kid car. What’s a big kid car you ask? Aren’t all road-worthy cars technically ‘big kid cars’ since children shouldn’t drive? (Take note of that last detail Ms. Brittany Spears.) Well this was the first car we have driven for them that was NOT specifically designed to hold three car seats, two strollers (one a double!), seven billion suit cases full of stuffed animals, one lovey, four 60 litre drums of Cheerios, and two adults. The Buick Regal was designed to hold five well-heeled adults, three lapdogs, plus a whole pile of non-Disney logo laden luggage.
No sticky small children were taken into account in the design of this vehicle and it was refreshing. I mean, you can install car seats into this car and it’s not like it wasn’t designed for a family but look at the swanky dashboard below. I would not let any ground-up, half-eaten Cheerios into the vicinity of this shiny, totally responsive On-Star enabled fancy-schmancy dash. Okay, maybe I might, but then I would totally clean it all up, like, the next day.
This car is what I like to call ‘European’ which is just my way of saying ‘classy.’ Anyway, when I read through the specs it said it has an ‘European-tuned chassis’ which either explains why the sound system was totally kick-ass when spinning my German 80s techno remix CD or maybe it explains why it handled so well on the twisty turns of Highway 97. Either or, both made me happy.
So the Bad Moms Club drove in total Regal style last week (heh, could not resist regal pun) and we’ll be telling you more where we drove this car because those adventures? Well, they just made this driving experience into a true Amazing Race. Albeit no racing was allowed and Catherine was kind of mad that she never got to jump on a mat at any of our destinations to find out if we were the FIRST TEAM to arrive but despite all that, we still had a blast.
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