The crazy trip part 2

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 9:26 am

The car dealer that we were working with was a super nice Christian guy. He practically bent over backwards trying to get us a new vehicle in a very short period of time. As I said in part 1, there weren’t any 12 or 15 passenger vans in our area anywhere.
By now it is Wednesday, day 7 of our move and we hadn’t left our little town of Colfax yet.
Dennis, the car guy, said that he did find some in a few other states and gave Ryan the details so we could decide on the one we wanted. All were brand new and all were available right away, though they were all white (I don’t like white vans). Ryan said thanks and hung up to discuss them with me. We decided on one particular van because of some of the extras it came with. Ryan called back Dennis with our choice and Dennis got to work on having it brought over.
But, in the 20 minutes it took for him to get back to the dealer who had the van it was gone.
This happened with the next 2 vans we found. We had no vehicle, no transportation, and a cross country trip we had to make. Things were seeming pretty dark. Still, Ryan and I tried to make the best of it by cracking jokes and keeping our attitudes with each other light and fun.

Finally, on Thursday, Dennis said that he had found a few 12 passengers that were available. 2 were white – I didn’t want white, and one was a metallic silver. All were brand new and, though they were 12 passengers instead of the 15 we originally wanted, we were just happy that it wasn’t white. We immediately called Dennis back and told him not to waste any time – we wanted that van.
He called us back 2 minutes later. The van was already sold.
Yes, they go that quick. It makes me wonder why they aren’t carried by more dealers.
So we ended up going with a white Chevy Express 12 Passenger family van. It was going to take a day to get it from where it was 8 hours away, then they wanted to detail it completely. Dennis said we could have it by about 5pm on Friday night.
Ryan went over to the dealer to do the paper work, work out a trade in deal on our broken down Suburban, spent some time on the phone with the bank, and discovered that our bank could not wire the money. Since we are military and we weren’t stationed close to any base we didn’t have a local Navy Federal Credit Union close to us. We had to wait for them to mail a check. They said they would overnight it and we would have it by Monday afternoon.
We were stuck for another weekend.
With the promise from the bank that we were financed the dealer said that we could go ahead and have the van when it was ready on Friday night.
Friday morning came and Ryan called the bank to get the tracking number so we could know for sure when the check would arrive. The bank said the loan was pending approval and we could not have the check right away like we were told the previous day.
Ryan just about reached through the phone to strangle the poor guy on the other end.
In the end it was just a computer glitch. The loan was approved however the check wasn’t set to be mailed anywhere. Thanks to Ryan for wanting that tracking number or Monday would have came and went without any check.
The issue was corrected, we picked up our van on Friday evening, and then decided just to leave town and put some miles on it before we had to tow the trailer with it. We headed over to visit some friends who lived a good 500 miles away for the weekend. The van drove great, the weather was nice, and the Montanan mountains were beautiful. Everything seemed to be getting better – and it was.
Until Sam came down with the ‘I just can’t poop’ disease.
Oh the screaming!
His little tummy was so bound up and his little pooeys were like rocks. The poor kids was in pain.
We did juice, we did raisins, we did more juice. This seemed to help but only temporarily.
Still, we had fun visiting our friends and Monday morning saw us traveling back to pick up our check and get out of Colfax.
Everything went smoothly until it came time to request the title for the Suburban from the bank. Apparently NFCU didn’t have the title to the car we had been paying them for over the last 5 years. After a little headache they were able to verify that they did, in fact, hold the lien to the Suburban and that was good enough for the dealer. They knew it was probably a paperless title and would be solved easily. So, we left a little later than we intended but the good thing is that we finally left! We didn’t drive but a few hours before we hit Oregon and decided to stop for the night. Our goal for Monday was just to get out of Washington. Once that was accomplished we decided to sleep. We were having such a mixture of feelings. Elation to finally be on our way, exhaustion from spending the first 12 days of our trip waiting and unsure with no home, jumping from abode to abode, not knowing what to expect from day to day, and frustration that we just spent a lot of money on a van we were supposed to be able to wait to buy until our house sold.
Still, we were finally on our way, we were safe, and we had a nice little hotel to sleep in.