Wednesday, June 4, 2008

more like... Can't Drive, Just Ride.

Well, needless to say it's been an interesting last few days. But before we dive into everything, no I did not lose my drivers license.

Let's start back a few weeks ago when I was driving home from Mars. There is a corner record store affectionately called The Corner Record Shop [creative I know], that had an old VW Bus sitting there that had a small for sale sign on it. Like many, that vehicle has always caught my eye and I thought it would be fun to have. But I left it at that, saying that I'm not in the position to buy another car, let alone anything that might be a fixer-uper.

On Sunday a few friends of mine went to play a quick 9 of disc golf and after finishing my roommate and I decided to give the VW a closer look just for kicks. Well, this is where the fun truly began. It looked pretty good, given it was a '79 and you have to consider that. For kicks I decided to put my car on Craigslist without any pictures, just to get a feeler if there was any interest. I did this late last year and had no response. This post was placed at 3:46pm Sunday.

By 5ish, I had already received 10 emails, 2 or 3 each wanting to see the car soon. By 7ish, 3 more emails and I had begun to line up a time to get together with a potential buyer. I had to run some errands and hang out for dinner with friends. This person was so interested that they wanted to come over Sunday night at 10:30 to check it out! Crazy! I agreed and at this point I was still trying to figure out exactly what I was going to do.

I get home at 10pm, get a few last thing together. The guy and his daughter come over and take the car out for a drive. In talking with them, he said that he had lost out on two cars earlier that day and was going out of town Tuesday and had to get this settled before hand. After the test drive he asked how firm I was with the price and I said I felt I had a fair price on it and had no need to go lower with the amount of interest I had gotten in such a short time. He agreed and said he'd take it.

Needless to say at about 10:50pm on Sunday I had sold my car. Now this puts me in quite a difficult spot, do I rush out and purchase this VW Bus? I decided to take it for a test ride Monday. It drove fine, has a few issues but for the most part I was sold but I wanted to get it check out Tuesday by a mechanic. Unfortunately, Tuesday was not as glorious. The mechanic wasn't opposed to price I had worked out with the seller but he did bring up a lot of great and valuable information that I had not thought through.

I decided that the smart thing was not to get the VW but now that does leave me vehicle-less. Which is AWESOME! The beast is gone and the crutch has been kicked out and it's time to really step up. I am now needing to be much more creative on getting rides and planning trips, and although not having a car at 26 and being single doesn't really help to solve that problem. It should be a good summer.

2 comments:

Jason Barthelemy said...

Nice! Way to get rid of your carbon footprint altogether. I hope that you find the means to drive through a thunderstorm quickly. I trust that this blog will keep me up to date.

Carl Buchanan said...

That's sweet!!! Talk about a quick sale, wow. Go as long as you can without the car man, I am jealous.