As it turns out, you can’t just drive a car to another country and let it stay there. You have to ship it and pay a bunch of people a bunch of money. You also have to pay a bunch of time. This is called waiting. The shipping is called importing. More often than not, it is not worth it. In the case of Panama, it was not worth it. Too much money, and too much waiting.
So we sold the cars. I’ve covered this previously. What I didn’t cover was the specifics of selling our Ford Flex. I will regale you with that now.
The Story of Selling the Flex
Garrett Hammerel, 2021
Originally, we thought that we would sell the Flex in July, and drive the Fiesta to California. This plan had no thought, so it was scrapped quickly. Revisions happened frequently and quickly during the early stages. Shit, Panama was a revision. We’ll cover that another time.
So we sold the Fiesta, and decided we would drive the Flex to LA. This would allow us the space for our dogs, our kennels, and our children. We mustn’t forget the children. We had considered selling it in Idaho and renting a van to drive south. In fact, we even got Ben to agree to sell the car for us once we were gone. This was not our final plan, because there are no vans to rent to drive to California. Shortages, or something.
The Flex was a pretty big crossover with lots of room. I believe they called it such because it was flexible. If this was the case, it was an apt name. The damn thing even had these power folding rear seats. You could fold them so that they were pointed out the back. This was “tailgate mode”. For our purposes, we had our kids sit front to back. Despite my best efforts, we were unable to figure out how to use “tailgate mode” for our 16-hour trip. I have prepared a well put-together diagram to help illustrate what we did:
Let me just say real quick: Fernley, Nevada is an absolute shit hole. We stopped there night one of our drive, and came really close to relapsing. Now, Taige and I have never had any addictions that necessitated rehab, but Fernley felt like the place you went to relapse. If you are in the area: try Reno. It’s not much better, but it is better. In all honesty, I would just skip the area if you can. I could have built a small raft from the small liquor bottles I found in the dog area behind the Super 8. We ended up paying like $160 to fear for our lives for 12 hours. Not a great investment.
On the other hand, there were a few towns in California that were adorable. One was called Bishop. I honestly don’t know what the other were called, but they were of the same ilk: they looked like they had stopped developing in 1964. I guess that’s how I like my towns. Unfortunately, they were in California, though; so that’s gonna be a “no” from me, dog.
The Flex got us to Los Angeles safely eventually, and we had to sell it. Before we left Idaho, we got a price quote from Carvana for $11,000. Carvana is one of those big box car purchasers that are ruining the used car markets, but we didn’t care, because we needed money. Unfortunately for us, this was too little money. So, we went to CarMax, their competitor. They offered us $14,000. We liked that better.
There was a bit of a snafu, because we ended up getting our 7-day quote 8 days before we got to California, but it ended up working out. Now, we were sitting in the CarMax in LA by the airport waiting for our check. They had already verified the price and everything was agreed upon. We had been here about three hours, and we had another five until our plane boarded just down the road. Then we heard them talking about our Flex, and it didn’t sound good. Initially, I told Taige it was nothing, because that’s what I do whenever anything happens. Especially when I don’t actually know if it is nothing or not. It could very well be something, and in this case it was something.
Turns out our car was from Canada.
“Ok, what does that mean?”
It meant that the car could not legally be sold in only one state. You can guess which one.
Turns out, that stuff happens all the time in northern states. We had no idea.
We were panicked. We needed this thing sold, and we needed to get to the airport. First, we called Colter.
“Hey, buddy. Hey, um…. if we bought you a plane ticket, would you be into driving our car from California to Idaho and selling it when you get there? We’ll split the profits with you?”
He was into the plan, but we were not. It dawned on me that we had gotten really close until they saw the little badge under the hood with the maple leaf that had alerted them to this unique issue. CarMax was a big resaler, who probably sees Canadian cars frequently and knows to look out for them…
So we went across the street to a local guy who was undercutting CarMax. He offered us $14,240. He didn’t know about Canadian cars. He also stole $2,500 out of Taige’s purse. Such is life.
We said things like, “Carvana offered us $11,000. Even after he stole the $2,500, we still made a little bit more than that” and, “fuck California. He seemed very nice”.
Fuck California. He seemed very nice.
we, 2021
I guess I learned a few lessons from this section of our move story. The first is that my unjustified hate of California was actually justified. The second lesson I took from the situation was this: there is always someone dumber out there, myself included.
the eventually home 