Hi folks,
I know it's been a while since I've updated anybody with what is happening in this crazy ole adventure of mine, but it's been a pretty turbulent time I've been having and I wanted to make sure that I knew how it was going to turn out before I told anybody about it. I apologise in advance for the ridiculous length of my e-mail (and any future e-mails, I guess). I've also been staying in a lot of campgrounds over the past couple of weeks, so electricity hasn't been easy to get to, let alone wireless internet...
Anyway, I'll start with a brief recap of the aforementioned troubles that I'd mentioned up to my last transmission.
- We bought a '99 Jeep Cherokee in New Jersey. We were unable to register it in NJ due to not having a permanent address in the state. We were advised to drive up to Ontario and register it there.
- Realising that the temporary insurance we had gotten from the dealer was about to expire, we decided that after leaving NYC we would drive up to St. Catharine's, Ontario, Canada (the nearest town to the border) and get the car insured and registered, an endeavour we naďvely believed would take, like, a couple of days, tops.
- We were informed on trying to insure the car that we would be unable to register the car without an Ontario license, which we would also assume would be super easy, because Canada + Australia have a reciprocal agreement.
- After waiting in line for about 1.5hrs at the licensing centre we were told that we needed a detailed driver's history, which must be mailed, not faxed or e-mailed. This is only for West Australia, Ontario requires residents of nowhere else to do this. When we called the Department of Planning and Infrastructure in Perth, nobody knew what we were talking about. It took four calls and being referred to the police, and then back to the DPI, before we got anybody who could give us a straight answer.
- We decided to go stay in Toronto to try and sort this stuff out.
- Luckily Sam's father was flying into Toronto the week we were going to be there, so aside from getting gigantic steaks, he also brought the necessary documents, which saved us on having to rely on the notoriously unreliable Canadian postal service.
After this we got insured and spent our last few days in Toronto rather stress-free. We were lucky to spend a couple of days hanging out with my friend in Toronto, (hi Allison!!!), who showed us a bit more of the city than we had explored on our own and took us to the Art Gallery, as well as some of the city's better record and comic book stores. We also managed to stumble on a good stretch of Toronto's better clothes+shoe shops, so my opinion of Toronto eventually improved and I don't hate it so bad now.
Following our purchase of car insurance, (from a fella at State Farm who consistently disproved every bad stereotype about insurance salesmen by being friendly, helpful and forthcoming with both time and advice on all number of subjects) we had to kick on to the next part of our arduous journey, which was taking the car into Canadian Tire for inspection and installation of daytime running lights (For those outside of Ontario, all cars in Canada need to have their headlights on at all times on the road. Remember when old Volvos went past with their lights on in broad daylight and you went "haw haw what a dork"? THAT IS EVERYBODY IN ONTARIO). It took several days longer and cost way more than expected, but hey, you're dealing with car mechanics. So we shouldn't have been surprised. Stressful nonetheless.
Deciding that we didn't want to throw our schedule off anymore than we already had (we had to drop our planned stops in Buffalo and Rochester NY in favour of St. Catharine's and spent twice as long in Toronto as we wanted) we departed Toronto and drove (via a night in the carpark of a Walmart in North Bay, ON) up to Timmins, ON. There we stayed with the McDonald family (dad Phil, mum Helen, daughter Courtney, son Chad, daughter Kaylan, two dogs Remi and Kelso and extremely obese cat Milo), who are old family friends of Sam from when she lived in Timmins. Let me tell you about the McDonalds; they epitomise all the best aspects of the Canadian stereotype. Not only did they take us into their house, but they practically saved our entire trip. They were more generous to us than I could've possibly expected and they went out of their way to an almost ridiculous extent to help us out at the point when we most needed it. They also fed us to near bursting at every possible opportunity, and assailed us with waves of positivity and perspectives from the Bright Side whenever we felt like falling into a big heap under the weight of our problems.
So, still somewhat buoyant at finally getting over all of the problems with getting Sam her Ontario license and getting the car insured, we rolled into Timmins and made our way to the licensing centre to register the car and put an end to all of our troubles. It was pretty good to feel optimistic for a while, but it was only for a while. We got shuffled around to a few people in the licensing centre, and eventually started going through the motions of registering the car.
Then this happened:
The lady at the licensing centre taps our VIN number into the computer, and hesitantly informs us that our car is a Salvaged vehicle. This means that the car at some point in it's life has been probably stolen, crashed, totalled and then rebuilt. Not only is it illegal to register a car that has been salvaged in Ontario, it's even illegal to drive it. It is at this point that I maintain my composure only through my inability to decide whether to swear and punch the wall or curl up in a foetal position and cry. At that point I do nothing but the next week had plenty of time for both. I was pretty proud that I managed to stay positive and keep myself together during all of the previous setbacks. But at the time this genuinely felt that it was going to kill the entire holiday. All up we had poured about $7000 in to this car between actually buying the thing, getting temporary registration and insurance, getting non-temporary insurance, getting it inspected and fixing the problems that the inspectors found. And it seemed quite likely now that it was all going down the drain. Not to mention that the incredible strain was getting to both of us and at this point in the trip it seemed like we were genuinely cursed.
We were told at the license centre that we would quite easily be able to get what is called a "structural safety check", get the status of the car upgraded to "rebuilt" and make it legal to drive. We were outright told that this would take a couple of hours, tops. Now I'm quite sure you're able to work out what actually happened, 1150 words into this litany. We drove to the guy the licensing centre recommended us, who said that 1) he doesn't even do safety checks for cars he isn't selling himself and 2) it'd definitely NOT take a few hours. He sent us down the road to another fella, who curtly informed us that there was no chance that we could be fit in until the following week. We told him our story, Sam cried, no dice. Fuck that guy (Pardon my French).
We went home and in between bouts of feeling extremely very sorry for ourselves we began to investigate our options, as well as what our rights as consumers were. Let me outright state, in case it wasn't clear: We were not told, when we bought the car, that it was a salvage vehicle. If we had asked to see the history when we bought it, we probably would've seen it mentioned there. I admit that was a major error on our part and we are least partway responsible for what happened. But there is certainly an obligation on the dealer's part (and this is backed up by New Jersey law) to inform us that the car had been rebuilt. We even got in contact with a lawyer and the Better Business Bureau who told us the same. The problem with this is that because of our circumstances and also the amount of time between the purchase and when we actually found out the car was salvaged, we had no recourse through the government or other agencies, and if we hoped to get a refund, we would have to do it through the courts. And not just the Small Claims Court, because the amount of money involved was too high. Understandably, there was no way in hell we could feasibly sue this guy.
AND ANOTHER THING: How the hell did we get all the way to Timmins, nearly a month after buying the car, and it took us til actually trying to register the car that we found out it was a salvaged vehicle? Why didn't we find this out when we imported it at the Canadian border, or when we insured it, OR WHEN WE HAD IT INSPECTED IN ORDER FOR IT TO BE ABLE TO BE REGISTERED?
Sam called the dealer in New Jersey, and after declaring ignorance on the whole case (in other words, he's not evil, he's just a moron, that's much better am I right?) he offered to try to try to source the necessary documents in order to get the structural safety check to re-certify the car, which for some reason he did not have in the first place (This guy should really not be selling cars. At all. Honestly I really do wish we had the time and resources to sue him, not only to get our money back, but hopefully to see that nothing like this happens to someone in the future). It was Friday at this point, so we gave him the weekend to do that (and told him that yes, we would call him, because there was no way in hell that we trusted him to call us back. Sam was pretty merciless on the guy. Sam is fantastic, it was wonderful to see her pissed off as opposed to depressed.
Given that we could not do anything for the weekend, we tried to banish all of the worry from our brains and we went with Chad and Courtney down to their cottage for the weekend. We rode in a boat! We played beer pong! We slept and slept and ate and slept! We created fire! We dressed a dog up like it was people! (No animals harmed) It was fantastic. Sam and I have decided that we could just as easily live out in the middle of nowhere in a cottage as we could in a big city. Nowhere between, though. It's either complete, apocalyptic madman isolation, or insane dense metropolis. And yes, some folks do live out there, as a matter of fact there are some bona fide mansions in cottage country. It can get pretty ridiculous. A particularly trenchant example is the dude who moved on to the land where the Timlers used to have their cottage, and proceeded to knock down everything and build a huge house with perfectly manicured lawns, a two-storey boathouse/guesthouse bigger than the actual cottage the Timlers had, oh oh and a WATERSLIDE!
We returned Sunday evening and got up nice and early Monday to get back to work. We called the dealer and unsurprisingly, it was going to take 4-6 weeks (this seems to be the standard operating speed of bureaucracy) to get the documents for the structural safety (basically some forms filled out when the car was rebuilt, as well as "before" photos from when it was written off) to us. We informed him that that was 100% useless to us, and so he offered to give us trade-in value on the car for something else on his lot. On inspection of his website, he did not have another car on the lot that was under $6000 i.e; $1k more than what we paid for the Cherokee. Never mind that we had already ploughed nearly $2k into the car getting it up to spec for Ontario registration, or that we'd have to bring the car back down to NJ somehow, and seeing how it was illegal to drive in Ontario, that meant getting it towed back down which would cost us another lazy grand. At least. Real generous of you, man. More importantly than that, any car we bought from him we would once again have to import into Canada and pay taxes on i.e; probably another thousand dollars.
We spent at least a couple of days (A lot of the chronological details of all of this is actually pretty hazy, it was obviously an insane time in our lives and it was just under a month ago, my memory's not great at the best of times) fussing over our options, when once again our ever helpful insurance guy suggested that instead of sinking even more money and time (at that point the time being wasted was perhaps even more important than the money) into this obviously cursed vehicle that we should just bit the bullet and sell the thing for scrap, get what little cash we can for it and essentially cut our losses and start all over with a new car. It was incredibly painful to admit that this was going to be the best option for us, an option that would mean we'd be losing about $3500 EACH just like that. It became even more depressing when, after calling around to the scrapyards in the area, we'd be getting- at best- a couple of hundred dollars- I repeat, $200- for our completely functional, recently-inspected car which had driven us from Union City, NJ, to Timmins, ON (just under 1,000 miles all up) without the slightest worry. Unfortunately this really was the best option because even though we could've saved some money by taking different options, we would've wasted an awful lot of time, and missed going to even more places than we already had. And it was also becoming apparent that the process of buying a new car would eat up what little time we had left between then and the 3rd of September, which is when the ATP Festival in Monticello, NY began. We had both agreed early on that no matter what, we were definitely not going to miss that festival, as aside from the money issue, it was entirely likely that we would never get the chance to see some of the bands on the bill (Iggy & the Stooges, Sleep, Shellac) play ever again.
We finally decided that we would sell our car off for scrap to one of the local salvage companies, who were willing to give us $200 and free towing. We would then get a ride down to Barrie, Ontario with Courtney and from there catch a Greyhound bus to Ottawa where we would find a new car and proceed to actually have a holiday, instead of a several weeklong test of our sanity and resilience.
The morning we were meant to leave I woke up and as I was necking my first cup of precious coffee (one of the many things that made the McDonalds so beloved to me is that they were as crazy about coffee as I am), Chad informed me that if we wanted, he would give us $250 for the car, take some parts that he needed and attempt to sell the rest as individual parts and send the money along to us. We gratefully accepted. I'm gonna say it again, that family is amazing and they saved our trip. As much trouble as that car gave us, I wasn't looking forward to the idea of just selling it to a junkyard so giving it to the McDonalds felt far more right.
Rest In Peace Winston, The Jeep Cherokee. (1999-2004, 2004-2010)
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