Those are awfully kind words my friend. Are you sure the paint fumes aren't lingering?
As promised yesterday, I'll talk a little about why I chose a transit. Well, I didn't start off wanting a transit. I started off looking for a coach. I've been buying and selling a few buses along for some years. Over that time I've seen a lot of them. I also know how to get a bargain on one. Buy 5 to 10 at a time and you'll get a good deal. That may be, but it wasn't going to happen on my current wallet. I like to go to dog shows with my dogs and really missed doing that. I had sold my motor home a year earlier. I didn't want something with a payment so I decided to pick up a bus and do a cheap conversion. I've done two before so I knew what I was getting into. This time I was looking for something I could convert inexpensively.
So, I started looking at coaches. I looked and looked and looked. I found a lot of them. Pretty much every one of them was a mechanical disaster that hadn't been maintained. If you think car dealerships can fleece your wallet, buy a bus. You'll return to the car dealerships and tell them you can't believe how inexpensive their services are. I wasn't interested in buying junk that some 3rd tier charter operation had run all the equity out of, so I kept looking. After a while it was frustrating. Everything I was seeing was poorly maintained. You've got to avoid that because it will cost you a fortune to repair all the deficiencies.
I took a trip to Florida to look at an MCI that sounded good. In the end, it turned out to be a junk pile like many of the others. I declined to make an offer on it at all. As I was getting ready to leave, the guy tells me to come take a look at something he just bought at auction. He says it isn't a coach, but it is a good bus. We walk around to the back of his place and there are two Gillig Phantom transits. They had just been sold at auction from the transit agency. I hadn't been interested in transits originally, but these looked like pretty nice buses mechanically.
As I was inspecting them, I opened the engine compartment on the second one. My eyes were probably as big as moon pies because I thought I had hit the lottery. There sat a new Detroit Series 50 in that compartment. It also had a new radiator, new A/C condenser and new condenser fan motors. That's a pile of cash folks. He told me what he wanted. It wasn't out of line. So I thought about it for a while. I took it out for a test drive and it was nice. Everything worked correctly and performed nicely.
For what I would be doing a transit could work fine for me. After all, they have tons of room inside, have an a/c system you can hang meat in, and are as durable as they come. The down sides are the wheel wells inside, no storage underneath, and the rear door. After much thought and being really tired of looking at junk, I made him a low ball offer. I figured I could flip it if I decided I didn't want to keep it. He declined but countered. In the end, we ended up with a deal. I came on back home on the plane that day, but went back next week to pick it up. It drove out and ran really nice. Maybe I'll keep this after all.
The next week I used some of my contacts to get the maintenance records on the bus. I flipped through the records. Sure enough, that engine was replaced and had 7,000 miles on it. The more I looked at it, the more I liked it. So I finally decided to keep it and make it my dog show bus.
The girls approved.
![Image](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-s7Q4p-W9ZvI/US7PT7c0YJI/AAAAAAAAA1Y/rPDgVnHYzOo/s800/SAVANNAH.JPG)