Day 67: Checking out a car!

I spent most of the day blogging from our weekend in Paris and I'm starting to feel sick again. I don't know what it is about the German weather or if it's just me trying to do to much when I don't feel well. Oh well, I'll take a rest and see if I feel any better.

We have an appointment this evening to check out a car. It's an older model 5 series BMW station wagon. It looked pretty good when we saw on base last week.

When Ted got home, he tried calling the number that he had on file for the car. A little girl answered the phone and said her parents were in Huntsville, Alabama looking for a house. HUH? Ted was perplexed and so was I. I couldn't imagine someone making an appointment and not telling the person he was leaving for the states. Perhaps it was unexpected.

I convinced Ted that we should go over to Patch again and take a look at it, perhaps the child who answered the phone wasn't a part of the family...I don't know but we need to see if we can test drive the car.

So we head over to Patch. We get there and the car is parked in the parking lot. We walk around it and verify we have the right number.

Two little girls are walking by and then they turn around and the one girls said, "if you are looking at the car, it belongs to my friend here". We ask the little girl if her parents were around. She told us again that her parents were in Huntsville but her grandfather is staying with them. That's who Ted must have made the appointment with! She said to come in...and we told her to have her grandfather come out so we could talk.

It turns out, the car is owned by a Lt. Colonel in the army. He and his wife have 10, that's right, TEN children!!! The grandfather said he retired from the Army after 31 years and his son has the same rank as he had when he retired! The grandfather showed us the car and said to go ahead and test drive it so we did.

He misstated the mileage...it didn't have 120K but 220K on it. BIG difference. The front seats were worn (leather) but the read seats were cloth and in good shape. We talked about the tires and how the Germans had winter and summer tires. He said you only needed all-weather tires and we'd be OK. This car had all-weather tires on it.
The car ran like a top. There was just a few spots of rust which I found amazing given the age of the car.

When we returned Ted backed the car into the parking spot. We told the grandfather that we would like to think about it and would get back to him. In the car, Ted said he saw black smoke coming out of the tailpipe. Not a good sign in a car that takes gas. He said he'd expect that from a diesel engine but not from a gas engine car.

We nixed this car. We'll just have to keep looking!