So now we had purchased a 5th wheel, but didn’t have possession yet and didn’t have a truck to bring it home with. The waiting game is always the worst. We keep wondering if we made the right decision and wishing we could just get possession already.
If there’s anything I like less than the waiting game it might be searching for a new vehicle. It wouldn’t be so bad if we were going to just go to several dealerships, test drive several vehicles, pick the one we like the best and work out a deal on it. But when you don’t have that much money to spend and refuse to go into debt on it, finding a car, van, truck, or anything with four wheels becomes a nightmare, especially when the nearest big city is an hour away.
We began searching for a truck on all the common websites (autotrader, cars.com, carguru, craigslist, etc.) and made more than one wasted trip going to look and test drive them. Our criteria was simple:
- Must have six seats
- Must be diesel
- Must be 4WD
- Ford F-350 preferred
- Long bed preferred
- Single rear wheel preferred
- To fit our price range and engine type it needed to be between a 1999 and 2003 model
Seems simple enough right? Wrong! Unless you’re willing to settle for junk that is about to rust off the tires it is NOT easy to find. We did finally find one in good condition that met all of our criteria at a Ford dealership about 45 minutes from our house and made a deal on it.
