A few weeks ago I was made aware of a marketing campaign offering the use of a 2008 fully loaded Dodge Caravan for week. Participants were asked to simply drive the minivan for a week and write/talk about their experiences - "Word of Mouth" advertising.

Now, I am not a naïve girl. I know that our family was chosen because I have three kids, lots of activities, and (most importantly) said that we were looking to buy a car within a year.

I am sure the expectation is that after spending a week in the new Caravan, we would be more likely to look in that direction come car buying time. Ideally (from their point of view), a week of Sirius TV, DVD players, video game plug-ins, and swivel chairs would be so appealing to my eight and eleven year old son that they would beg, plead, badger and whine for us to go out and buy a Caravan immediately.

Well, here's the thing: We ARE planning to buy a car in the next year or so, but only if one of our current cars dies completely. That isn't entirely outside the realm of possibility, since my husband's Subaru has about 200,000 miles on it and my Oldsmobile has almost 100,000 miles (anyone want to guess which one we think will die first?), but what IS impossible is that my kids will whine me into submission.

Regardless of how much we might like this minivan, there's no way we are going to go out next week and drop $40,000 on a comparably equipped one for ourselves.

That being said, we decided that we were going to have fun with this project and go whole hog into the "word of mouth" bit, so for the next week or so I'll be posting regularly updates on our doings, starting with the day before yesterday, Halloween ...

Our Caravan was dropped off at about lunchtime, and the most important requirement for me was met immediately - RED! Technically, I believe it is "Inferno Red Crystal Pearl," a darker red than the typical Dodge red, and an improvement.

It's a boxy looking minivan, I guess decent enough looking - but very few cars make me good "ooh" and "aah," so my opinions on the exterior are pretty worthless.

Immediate positives - the swivel chairs and tables. I know that for longer trips, including jaunts to Broomfield for sports games, my boys would enjoy the ability to turn the chairs around a central table to play games.

We found pretty quickly that the swivel doesn't work well with our toddler seat, at least as it's installed currently - the recline makes it necessary to move the front seats up into knee cracking range.

I don't think either of us are really above average in height (I'm 5'8" and he's 6'0"), so this would probably be a fairly common problem. If he was still rear facing in that seat, I'm not sure the front seat could be moved far enough forward to accommodate the swivel. Even though he can't participate in games with his older brothers, he definitely wants to be able to watch!

The kiddie picture was taken with the chair swiveled about 45 degrees - NOT in a locked position, just enough for a photo op. He's Roo, by the way. As we found out when we went to our elementary school for Halloween parties, Roo is not a recognizable character. Everyone thought he was Piglet, Pooh, a rat, or a dog. I guess that's why there is a big "ROO" written right on the front of the costume, which you can't see in this picture.

Another immediate positive, for the boys at least - the DVD/Satellite TV. Sirius knows who sits in the backseat, so they've chosen to use their bandwidth for Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, and Cartoon Network. My husband rode around in the back seat to play around for a while and said that the picture isn't that great compared to the DVD we popped in, but he's in broadcast and is a total video snob.

I'm sure most kids don't care if Spongebob is in high def. Then again, if I was paying for a subscription to the service, I'd probably want a pretty good picture. I'll update later with reviews from the youngsters.

After our Halloween parties, we came home and did the trick or treating thing, and then the baby and I went out after dark to run a few errands, which brings me to my first negative - the interior lights.

This isn't really a negative because I'm sure I'll get used to it, but the interior lights are a blueish LED that just threw me off. I think the intent was to provide a light that wouldn't distract the driver, and the targeted lights are definitely an improvement in that arena, but ... it's blue! Can't really explain it, just a different kind of light. I'm such a creature of habit.

I didn't drive around nearly as much as my husband probably would have if he'd been able to skip workon Halloweenbut we have big plans for the week! More later, as events unfold ...