In 2007 our family purchased a Honda Odyssey. It was a great family car, but since my daughters grew up it’s become an excellent vehicle for real estate and surfing. A picture says a thousand words, and as you can see from the photo, I’ve got three large boxes of old paint cans in the back of the Odyssey from my sale at 359 Orchid Dr this week. Over the years I’ve regularly hauled seller’s belongings to the San Rafael dump and recycling resource center in the Odyssey. It’s very convenient.
Despite being almost 20 years old and worth little on the resale/trade-in market, the Odyssey is invaluable to me. Last year the air conditioning went out. That’s kind of brutal when the weather gets warm. I talked to my mechanic and the fix would be more than $1,000, and he couldn’t guarantee the fix would work. The Odyssey isn’t currently worth much more than $1,000 so I’m not going to get it fixed. That’s not the only thing not working properly. One of the side doors doesn’t open, and there’s no sense paying for that to work either. It’s still a great car.
The Odyssey is perfect for surfing too! It fits my 9’0 Jimmy Lewis board nicely, plus I can get my brother Fred’s 8’0 board and my friend Fremont’s smaller board in the car too. We’ve even fit Fremont’s son and his board along with the three of us, but that gets to be a bit of a tight squeeze. Ocean Beach, Stinson Beach, Bolinas and even Santa Cruz have all been frequent destinations for the Odyssey. When my daughters were little, we used to use the car for regular camping trips to places like Samuel P. Taylor Park and New Brighton State Beach. It was also an excellent vehicle for the drop-off and pick-ups at the Terra Linda Recreation Center, where my daughters swam with the Terra Linda Orcas from elementary school through high school. The Odyssey has certainly been on an Odyssey, which continues to this day.
Speaking of tight squeezes, currently there are a lot of buyers on the market and few properties for them to choose from. This has led to numerous bidding wars, happy sellers and lots of disappointed buyers struggling to get into the market. For the past two weeks there have literally been no new single family homes on the Terra Linda broker’s tour. If you are thinking of selling in the near future, your timing couldn’t be better.