So it was a crazy idea, fly out to Iowa, pick up a 25 year old car, and drive it 1300+ miles home. I didn't start to get really nervous until the day before when I starting thinking the whole thing through. Worse my wife wanted to come with me. Its one thing to beat the snot out of yourself driving 1300+ miles, its another thing entirely to do it with another person.
The car was okay, keep in mind it was a $1500 car so I wasn't expecting perfection. It starts good and runs nice. The speedo is off, Don (the owner) said he thought it was like 7mph off, I think its alot more like 20mph as it said we were going 70mph in 3rd gear. He also said it was "crazy fast" when it fact is just about the same as my 190D... The rust was a little more extensive than I'd thought but thats not a big surprise as he'd told me his pics made it look better than it was.
What did surprise me was the lack of working door locks. We'd hoped to spend a day in Chicago with a friend of mine but with no working door locks (no trunk lock at all) that surely wasn't gonna happen.
Then there was the missing radio antenna, one rear window that wouldn't work and a bunch of other little piddling stuff (oh, bad bad rear shocks, felt like you were at sea) that all compounded into me having a really bad feeling about driving 1300+ miles.
If I had that car here and it was for sale for $1500 it'd be a no brainer, bring it to me now. I'd have time to fix the little things at my leisure and all would be well... I just didn't feel comfortable with that distance a drive with a car I wasn't really sure about. Don didn't seem to want to sell the car either, witness that he fixed the locks the day AFTER I left...
So anyway I'll be fixing the 240D, the warts will be removed and it'll go back into service. It'll become the $1500 car it was when I bought it originally. I'm going to keep my eyes open for another VW though, I liked what I saw...
-Curt
No comments:
Post a Comment