i bought a car...sort of on a whim.

I bought a car...kind of on a whim...?! What I mean is; I have been wanting to buy a car, I just didn't mean to buy a car yesterday! I have had my Jeep Cherokee since 2004. I loved that car very much, but it has pained me for some time to put gas in it at its energy efficient 18 miles/gallon. It was at that point of no return, that if I did not try to still get some money out of it I would have to drive it until it died, which might have been sooner than I would have liked. So, I have been looking and researching for some time for a car with with good gas mileage that I liked. My problem with getting a car has been my love of having an SUV (and my lifelong, secret, desire for a Jeep Wrangler, which gets equally as awful gas mileage as the Cherokee, but makes me drool).
So, I set out my criteria for the what I wanted in a used car (Civic, Corolla, Jetta with low mileage and low cost), I pitched this info to two people in the car world that I know, to get them to look for me and I looked a ton online to no avail. What I wanted didn't exist in the used car world because those cars hold their value well and people drive them until they have a large amount of miles on them. A few days ago my mom started asking me how I felt about looking at a new car and she thought I should go look, so I did. I went to a Honda dealership yesterday afternoon (unshowered and in a time crunch mind you...with NO intention of buying a car obviously because I just wanted to do research) and I came home with a car. I went in not really knowing what I wanted and I came out with a car, a great car actually. They had one brand new 2009 Honda Civic on the lot that they were trying to get rid of. It had more than I wanted on it, but it was not priced too much over the basic model 2010 I was looking at and it was several thousand dollars off the sticker price. This is the only reason I came home with a car.
Although, I do not regret the decision today I was VERY stressed yesterday because as I said I didn't have enough time for this. I didn't pull off the lot until 5:15 p.m. and I had 30 minutes to drive 20 minutes, shower and drive back to the church to meet a group of girls I had organized together to go to a women's worship night downtown. I had owned the car for 30 minutes and I knew how to work nothing on it! We drove halfway downtown with the lights off and one of the girls reading through the manual and pressing all the buttons trying to figure it all out!
I will miss my jeep, but I will not miss gassing it up. I am pleased with my "on a whim" purchase and I better be because it will probably be mine for the next 15 years!