Where’s The Gas Tank?
Picking up the van deserves it’s own post because it was a debacle.
Since I was visiting friends in Raleigh, NC and the van was in Charlotte, NC, I needed to pick it up and get it to TN (where I would be working on it) and myself to St. Louis, MO within 24hrs. Sounds crazy, you say? Yes.
The plan was to take the train from Raleigh, NC to Charlotte, NC in the morning, grab an uber from the train station to take me to the dealership where I would sign the final paperwork and drive off with my new van and venture 7 hours to Nashville, TN where I would hop a flight to STL and be there by midnight. Audacious? Sure but doable, or so I thought.
This post could have been named ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ because that most accurately describes what happened over the next 24 hrs. I got to the train station for the earliest train out and was too anxious to sleep so I just watched rural NC fly by my window. When I got to Charlotte, I got an Uber and he took me right over to the dealership. I signed the rest of the paperwork and declined the warranty (because they are a waste of money, right??). They take a photo of me in front of the van and I get in, set my GPS to Nashville, TN and take off. Not five minutes after driving off the lot, the check engine light comes on. Queue sheer panic and the scene from Matilda where Danny Davito is cranking old car odometers back to read that there are fewer miles on the car than the truth. Had I been dupped? Did I buy a lemon?? I called my dad. obviously. He told me to take it back to the dealership and have them figure it out. So I turned the van right around and gave the dealership a call to let them know I was coming back and wanted their mechanic to look at the van.
I get back to the dealership and they have someone look at it but say they won’t be able to do any work on it until the following Tuesday. Well, that wasn’t going to work for me, I would be in Montana on Tuesday and didn’t have time to have them wait that long. After two hours, the owner said he could give me a check for $1,400 and I could get it fixed on my own (& just hope that whatever was wrong with it would hold out on my 7 hour drive to TN). I accepted because I was in a bind. Here’s some advice - don’t do this. If the vehicle is messed up, have them figure it out and fix it for you or leave the deal or literally any other choice than ‘okay, well bye thanks for the money’..
So I leave and am very behind schedule but am hoping to make up time on the road. Nope, I witnessed at least five car accidents including one on Black Mountain where I sat in an empty white cargo van for an hour and half. Just sitting. Not moving and hoping I didn’t run out of gas. When I finally got off the mountain, I stopped at a gas station to fill up. My Transit has a 3.2 liter Diesel engine and I had no idea where the gas was supposed to go in.. Talk about just flying by the seat of my pants. I had no clue what I was doing. I luckily had service at the gas station and looked up ‘how do I fill up a diesel ford transit with gas’ on YouTube. Thank god for YouTube. I figured it out, filled up, got a subway sandwich and was back on the road. There was just not a chance in hell I was going to make my flight in Nashville that night so about an hour and half before the flight was about to take off I cancelled it and got on the next one at 6am Saturday morning. I called my uncle to let him know that I would be late and asked if he could get up early to get me to the airport the next morning. A big ask but he agreed and had some air fryer chicken tenders waiting for me when I arrived at the house.
The van safely made it to TN where it would stay until I could pack up my apartment, sell and store my belongings, and move myself and my dog temporarily to TN with my aunt and uncle to build my van. So much happened in those 24 hours that it could have all been a fever dream.
