withoutwhatifs

This is a long post, but an important one to document because the only thing that got us through this hellish weekend was telling ourselves we’d look back on it one day and laugh.

This past Saturday, Derek, Mark (Derek’s Dad), and I woke up bright and early to make the 6 hour drive to upstate New York, Watertown to be precise, to buy the 1962 Shasta tow-behind camper that we’ve had our eyes on for our trip. We were making great time and planned to pretty much turn right around with the camper in tow and head back to Ware.

Fast forward 3 days, 2 nights at a Best Western, and many, many beers later, and we’re still in New York, in the middle of nowhere, and haven’t even made it far enough to see the camper, let alone buy it. After we pulled off of the highway in New York that Saturday, I had made a comment that, “this drive isn’t too bad, we’ll probably get there faster than planned,” and almost immediately after the words came out of my mouth, the transmission shit the bed. I don’t know much about cars or engines, but I knew by the look on Derek’s face in the driver’s seat, and Mark’s tone from the passenger seat, that it was bad and from that point on, we could barely break 20 mph. We stopped at several garages, hoping for a quick fix, and even that was a challenge because it was Saturday, and in the middle-of-nowhere-cornfields-all-around-us New York, everything shuts down by noon on Saturday and is closed until Monday. The two places we stopped that were open, while they couldn’t really help us, basically confirmed what we had feared: the truck would need an entirely rebuilt or new transmission which could cost us upwards of $5,000. This is the same truck that we were planning on driving across the country with in just two short weeks, oh and yes, we had already quit our jobs for this little adventure, and now we didn’t even have a functioning vehicle. The irony was not lost on us, and needless to say, Derek and I were taking very deep breaths and trying not to panic.

At this point, we were just an hour short of where we needed to pick the camper up from, so we figured, we’ve come this far, but we know our truck won’t make it much further and certainly won’t be able to tow a camper the 6 hours home, so why don’t we look into trading the truck in for another one which we’ll need anyways for our road trip. Problem was, all the dealerships were closing except for one: good ole Davidson Chevrolet. Side note: if you’re ever in Watertown, New York and pass this dealership, stop in and ask to see Larry “Crafty” Kraft and give him a big f*ck you on our behalf.  Larry basically sold us on a truck that he would have to get from a neighboring dealership but said it wouldn’t be there until Monday, but at least it gave us a shot at being able to drive off with a good truck and head home having gotten the camper we came all this way for. But as it turns out, when we came back to the dealership on Monday, Larry strolls in at 11:30am (because that seems like a reasonable time to start your work day) and tells us that the truck sold earlier that morning and we were basically shit out of luck. Whether this truck ever existed, or if he ever had plans at all of keeping his word on getting us out of there on Monday, we were stuck. We could drive home, without the camper, having wasted 3 days in New York resting solely on the word of a sheisty car salesman named Larry, or we could keep looking for other trucks to buy nearby in the off chance that we could still get our camper and the weekend wouldn’t be completely shot.  We decided to call it. With our heads hanging low, we got back in the truck, road the breakdown lane the whole way home with our hazards on at a whopping 45mph, and made it home that night after over 10 hours of driving.

So you’re probably wondering what we did for 3 days in Watertown, NY, which is basically a town of the walking dead – deserted storefronts plastered with for sale signs, pregnant teenagers smoking cigarettes, home of the longest consecutively running country fair in the country, two bars (if you look really hard for them), and generally miserable people who are happy to share with you how crappy Watertown is.  Well, we frequented those two bars and made the best of it, heavily drowning our sorrows. We had a great stay at the Best Western, crashed a wedding after-party at the hotel bar one night, took a walk along the river, went to that county fair and tried a corn dog for the first time, had the best dinner thirty bucks can buy three people, talked to a few locals to ask them where all the people were, and had some pretty good laughs along the way.

So no camper yet, and we do still need to get another truck, but the silver lining is that at least the truck didn’t break down in the middle of our trip when we were thousands of miles from home. It was hard at times not to see all of this as a bad omen, that maybe we shouldn’t be getting this camper, or maybe we should be re-thinking our trip altogether. But I think it was more of a test to see how well we responded to stressful situations on the road and I think we did a pretty good job of staying positive and getting through it.  And at the end of the day, the three of us had a fun weekend, made some memories, and walked away with some pretty sweet wolf t-shirts.