I've been driving a Toyota 4Runner trail edition to work for 5 years and it just turned 100,000 miles so I was looking for a daily driver under $10k to save my truck for a while. Something with AWD that I might enjoy driving and fix up. My son has a new Forester in Connecticut and I got to drive it and I really liked it. I found from online research that for $10-12k I might find an '09-'13 with 100k miles and that for better performance I should look for a 5 speed stick. Good luck... there are not that many in Texas like that. So I searched every day online car dealer's inventory and after 4 weeks found a stock '09 2.5X manual for $9500 with 88k miles! I called the dealer and bought it sight unseen. The dealer was 6 hours north of me, Texas is a big state, they agreed to drive it and meet me half way for $400. That way if there was an issue with the head gasket or something else it might manifest itself during the 3 hour drive to meet me. First I have to say this car has some torque. My first day driving 35 miles to work in a heavy driving rain storm I could feel all 4 wheels on the road and I was zipping through traffic with ease. This weekend I'm installing after market fog lights from Blinglights.com and I ordered 19mm RSB with link kit from SubaruOnlineParts.com along with a set OEM 16 inch alloys. That will keep me busy for a while. What next?>
