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Thinking about buying a car without a car … 🚘️

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What came first? The first chicken or the first egg?

I’ve been watching videos on car buying strategy to get a fair price and good service when buying a new automobile. It has me thinking about what my strategy will now that Big Red is retired. I also have several books I’m getting out from the library on both the seller’s and buyer’s perspective on the transaction. While similar to when I bought Big Red, setting out a cash price, I also want to be much more informed about inventory and price, as I do think I may have overpaid a bit for the truck, not fully understanding the different 1/2 ton packages Chevy offered that year.

Buying a car gets a bit complicated as I don’t have a car, so I have really only a handful of options to getting to car dealerships – catch a bus and/or bike there – ask somebody for a ride – rent a car for a day. I probably want to do the first option, discretely as that gives me the most flexibility. I won’t ride my bike into the dealer’s lot, but instead walk over so they can’t see how I got to dealership except on my feet. When I asked if I have a trade, I will keep an open mind on that, but remind them it’s something to discuss in the finance office once we have a price. I certainly don’t want them to know I took a city bus there and want to be able to drive home at any costs.

Right now, I am dealing with the emotions of losing Big Red. And while I have used public transit and biked in the past to get around town, I want to get really experienced and comfortable with it, so I can walk into the dealerships with zero pressure. I want to spend the month of January researching as much as I can about trucks, though I am strongly leaning towards a basic SuperDuty 4×4 long bed regular cab truck. Not as much for price but for it’s Plain Jane but big nature. But that ignores the vast options you can get even of just those trucks regular cab long bed, especially if you are willing to consider both the F-250 and the F-350. My first mistake in researching trucks was thinking there was a significant difference between the two. There really ain’t.

Then come February, I want to test drive one of those trucks to confirm that is my choice of vehicles. Catch the bus up to Metro Ford and DePaula Ford, tell them I am looking at 3/4 ton and 1 ton trucks. In advance, I’ll print out window stickers of vehicles I’m interested in. I don’t have to make clear I am not buying that day, but I do want to hear their sales pitch. Then leave without buying. I don’t want to buy a truck and get it salty, and I would rather have the pressure on dealer not me to buy when I want at a price I want. I am sure if I give them my phone number, they’ll be harassing me within minutes after I walk off the line. I have a feeling thought, they’ll be thinking I am into budget trucks and my budget stretched – but I want a basic configuration SuperDuty not just for price but also reliability, ease of maintenance, and fuel economy. No LED lights, please!

Obviously, if Metro Ford and DePaula treat me well, I will be more likely to consider purchasing from them even for a slight mark up. I have a feeling at least one or two of them will be trying to convince me what I want to a 1/2 ton with all the features or probably a Ford Ranger. You can get a top of line Ford Ranger for the price of a basic F-250/F-350. Don’t you want those high tech screens and self driving sensors? Heated seats? No! But I don’t want a little fancy truck. I want real truck, one that I can push hard, drive a lot of rough dirt roads, idle, and drive full days on the highway with no issues. Cheap bastard the dealership will probably say, or insist I must some kind of contractor or farmer.

Truth is once I’ve climbed into and driven a SuperDuty or whatever truck I end up deciding to buy, they’re all going to be pretty much alike, it’s just a matter of package and price, and I can pretty much buy sight unseen. If the dealer isn’t local but offers a good price, and agrees to honor such a price in writing, I can get bank check, and mail it to them, and when it clears pick the truck up. New vehicles in particular are going to be identical from the factory, bar the features that listed out on the window sticker and dealer write up.

When it comes down to it, I think the best strategy is to work the phones and emails to buy a vehicle. You can avoid answering questions to dealer on the phone. It’s easier to hang up then walk off a property. It is much better to investigate when you have full window sticker in front of you and can read the details carefully before paying. All of the major car dealers have websites, and you can call them up and email them asking for the out the door price on the vehicle – what you would cut the check for if you pay for cash, ask the bank to finance, or finance through the dealer. Ask the dealer for a written break down of the fees and taxes, which are mostly imaginary as dealers pay both of those things, but are part of the total out the door costs. Some dealers won’t give it to you remotely, but if they want your business and think your legitimate, they will. For example, if I don’t hear from a dealer in Syracuse there is no way in hell I’m going to get a ride or take a bus out there to visit in person just to get a total out the door cost.

Some people suggest searching dealers within a two state radius of your home state. Indeed, if you can come to an agreement that saves you thousands of dollars out the door, a plane, train or bus ticket is worth it. Seems a bit more traveling then I want to do but I will consider a radius from Glens Falls to Syracuse to Oneonta to Newburgh to North Pittsfield to Bennington. I will contact outlying dealers first, and if anything its practice in getting quotes for out the door prices for vehicles. But whatever info gets me is both a negotiating tool, and if they offer a good rate, I’ll buy from them. No reason you have to buy from the local dealer. It would be a fun adventure to take a train or bus to a remote town, get picked up by dealer at the train station, hand them the check and drive home in what will be the basis for my new rig.

Once I gather information on real costs – and not the imaginary numbers on window stickers and dealer websites – I’ll make a decision mid-to-late March. There are a few reasons for doing it this way – I don’t want to get the new truck covered with salt until after the autumn when I coat it with fluid film. Also, dealers are more motivated to sell at the end of both the month and the quarter so they can meet manufacturer quotas. And the more time you take, the more the odds tilt towards you. While finance is something you decide after you settle on a price and vehicle, I will keep my options open. I generally dislike loans, but depending on incentives it could make sense. People said it was a mistake to not take 0 percent financing last time, when I could have been allowing my cash to earn money in the markets. That said, I do like the finality of cutting one check and owning the vehicle in the clear.

Buying a truck without a vehicle poses it’s challenges, but if I am strategic and learn the games the dealers play, and find the truck I really want based on Internet research, I can buy the truck I really want at a fair price and not risk getting scammed like so many do at the auto dealer’s lot.

And this the end of 2025 ⌛

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Did you think it would really end this way? Was it how you wanted to end? Years are gambled and lost like summer wages as Ian Tyson once sung.

It seems like it was just the end of 2015, not the end of a decade later. 🕒 Working a half day today, it’s just me and a single operator out of my team seven people, so it would be a busy day if it wasn’t the end of the year and things likely pretty slow. Then it’s to pick up a few things from the store, pull a few things out of the truck, go for one last drive with Big Red 🛻 and then this chapter of life will be done.  Just memories. The plates go back on Monday at lunch time to the DMV at Empire Plaza and I will drop insurance that afternoon.

It seems strange that the year is coming to end 🗓️ in such a definative fashion. Red’s retirement puts a closure on the year, kind of unlike any in my memory. 🚘 Tomorrow starts the car free life, which will last until at least late March but I’m not so set so in getting another big red (?!) truck right away, even I have been reading and studying up the various models available and scheming on how the best way to approach the buying process in a scientific way, to build the rig I really want. Maybe I’ll buy used, but it can be hard to compare used cars, not buy a lemon and get the vehicle you want. If you want a Honda Civic, then sure buy that 20 year old car, it probably still runs fairly reliable. I’ll start taking a serious look at trucks in Syracuse, Glens Falls, Newburgh, Bennington and Oneonta when March starts and work my way in-bound towards Albany. If I have to get a bus ticket to buy the truck I want at a good price and spend a day in North Syracuse, so be it. But first I want to become an expert at the car buying process, so I can get the out the door price on vehicles I’ve carefully studyed the ins and out, and then once I’m good with what I’m buying cement the deal but not a minute before it. 🔥 It’s stupid to rush to buy a truck so I can camp in woods in middle of winter to smoke grass and watch some plastic burn. I can at least smoke grass at home or in the park somewheres, at least some things are legal in New York even if you got to pay $2 fucking dollars to the state and wait each time you want to buy ammo. 🔫 And people are like, don’t you want to plastic house in suburbs with high speed internet?

I let slip in work that I’m retiring Red, 🚗 oh and did everybody have advice on buying cars, mostly along the lines you should buy a 20-year old Honda Civic, they’re so cheap and frugal.  Uses almost no gas you drive back and forth to the mall and suburban office complex. I guess if I was in that part of my career delivering pizzas for $5.15 an hour, and I lived somewhere I had to drive to the suburban office and needed to visit a dozen shops every day to pack full that 96-gallon garbage and woke plastics recycling dumpster every week, I’d go for the Honda. 🗑️ 🚙 🛍️ But the truth is I really hate driving in city traffic, though I admit probably those 20-year old Honda Civics everybody say are so amazing are easier to drive through traffic then a ginormous pickup with a Mini-Godzilla engine. Of course these are the people who love their plastic houses and can’t imagine anything worse then having a burn barrel for  burnable trash and butchering your own livestock or putting down your sickly dog with a bullet. 🐶 Man, do I love those cabins with tongue and groove and hate drywall and white walls to no end. Truth is with the amount of capital gains and income I have at this point, spending an extra $10k or $15k on the big pickup I actually want over a little Honda Civic, when spread over 10-14 years really is a pissy amount of money. It’s been a good year with the markets, 📈 I thought Trump was going to fuck us over with his buffoonery but ultimately the markets just plugged on, the world spun around 365 times and life went on. 🌎 Trump is a disaster, but people forget how broken shit was before him, and things did need to be blown up, but maybe with TNT and not a nuclear bomb. 💣

Not having a vehicle I won’t ever have to think about the January weather except on the debate to ride my bike to work. 🚲 I guess in some ways riding to the store and using the bike does involve more consideration of weather, 🌨️ but at least I won’t have think about icy roads or washing my truck after today. 🚿 I can just stumble out of bed, 🛏️ and catch the bus downtown. But today I do have to clean the snow off Red one last time. It just seems funny to be saying that, one more time. It will be kind of nice, even if in some ways getting around will be a bit more challenging though not that much because I drive so little in the winter.

I want to do a lot of reading in January, 📚 and I need to get my monthly borrows out on Hoopla before the clock strikes midnight. ⚡I’ve also been thinking about getting my soldering iron out and doing more electronics projects, maybe some more writing code, and other things to pass the time at home, though work consumes so much time and it goes by so quickly. I can’t believe Big Red is being retired tonight, and that he’s more then 14 years old now. 👴🏻 But then again, I never thought I would be so gray at age 28.

I put John Denver’s Rocky Mountain High on the record player, I mean the Mp3 player and pause a minute.

He was born in the summer of his 27th year
Comin’ home to a place he’d never been before
Left yesterday behind him, you might say he was born again
Might say he found a key for every door

When he first came to the mountains, his life was far away
On the road and hangin’ by a song
But the string’s already broken, and he doesn’t really care
It keeps changin’ fast, it don’t last for long

It kind of way a profound thought 🎂 to think that 14 years from now I’ll be 57 years old and quite possibly retired from my state job to focus on my off-grid homestead 🐐. But then again, I was 28 years old when I bought Red, and that seems just like yesterday. Things were different back then, and will be different again in 2040 which is what 14 years from now will be. Maybe I’ll find more direction in life by then, less confusion. I just don’t see myself buying a Honda Civic or a plastic-coated, drywall house with High Speed Internet and weekly garbage and woke plastics recycling service. 🗑️ Even if it smells like cow shit. 🐮

For the good times…

Don’t look so sad, I know it’s over
But life goes on and this old world will keep on turning
Let’s just be glad we had some time to spend together
Don’t say a word about tomorrow or forever
There’ll be time enough for sadness when you leave me

Money is gone once you spend it 💰 👉 🗑️

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One concept I find very hard to understand is the professed way of economics, as I am very schooled in American way of thinking – you spend money, it is instantly gone, and then you dispose of it at landfill. Be it buying a house or vehicle or any appliance. Once you spend money it is instantly turned into trash, there is no value in used material things, depreciation isn’t a real thing.

Do people actually resell their trash? Well, I guess much trash has some economic value, as people buy used cars and used houses, and get paid for scrap metal, but neither has any real value in my mind except for the utility it provides. I think there is too much focus on the value of used items – instead you should think of it is at trash – and if you get any value of an used object – it’s better then paying to dispose of it at the landfill.

Onions The Reliable Money Maker

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With the amount of onions I eat, usually 5-10 lbs a week, they are something I would want to grow when I have my own land.

Visiting the UP Next Year

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I planning on taking a road trip next summer to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Northern Wisconsin. And ultimately visit the “Sand County” , Aldo Leopold Shack and Farm in Wisconsin and the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, after spending sometime exploring in the UP after crossing the Mighty Mac Bridge, hopefully not in bad weather. None of those places are necessarily the highlight of the trip, but I’m giving them as well known examples so you can plot them on your mental map.

Honestly, I get very little pleasure out of visiting “well known” tourist places. It’s like my deep aversion to both the High Peaks of Adirondacks and the St. Regis Canoe Area. Yeah, I admit both places exist, and I may have once gone there, but it’s not exactly a place I strive to visit as much pass through. Such places are fine, good for the official tourist bureau post cards. And maybe the tourists in their SUVs.

I’ve been considering for some time doing trips out west, and people will argue that UP and Northern Wisconsin aren’t the west. Which I don’t disagree with based on map, but it’s further west then I’ve been to before. I thought about taking an airplane and renting a car, but for the UP isn’t not that far to drive from Albany, especially if I spend an overnight in a state forest in Chautaqua County, NY. Only 7 hour drive from there to Huron National Forest in Northern Michigan. Then the next day I could head up to the UP.

The truth is the places I am most interested in exploring aren’t well documented in National Tourist Bureau brochures, but are more off the beaten track, mostly known to locals and those who have been there in the past. I have a real aversion to National Parks, and parks more generally, though I will stop at a National Park or some well-known landmark if it’s not far out of the way and too not expensive if only to snap a photo or two and say, see I went there, and give people a frame of reference of where I was in my travels.

When I mentioned to people last week that I was thinking of taking at trip out west, the first reaction I got was, oh, I bet you would like Utah. They have some good National Parks there. Aren’t you excited about the possibilities of visiting Byrce Canyon or Zion National Park? Those were the same kind of people who were sure I would enjoy the Blue Ridge Parkway and Shenandoah National Park. Both were fine, I did part of the Blue Ridge Parkway twice, and it was fine, but I got to say neither one was particularly appealing even if it made for some nice photos. Too developed, too unnatural and unwild for my tastes.

Truth is I like to visit places that are remote and do not cater much for tourists. I’d rather be driving winding mountain roads, camping along little dirt roads in the back country, a long ways from anywhere else. Visiting “known-by-few nationally” landmarks that are scenic and wild but don’t get many tourists at all outside of locals. Deep, vast forest lands, remote country, in the sense they don’t involve parking lots full of cars and concession stands or mowed lawns. Places that when you tell people you want to visit – they respond with a blank stare – and ask why? Is there anything even worth visiting there? Places that are just a blank spot on the map.

I’ve also been thinking about taking a trip out to badlands of Western South Dakota and also the Ozarks of Arkansas and Missouri for a few years now. Those places also evoke a lot of confusion. Moreover, I am not looking per se to stay in motels or developed campgrounds there either, but to explore the back country of National Forests and other public lands there, away from the developed recreational areas. I’m not so against staying in a campground or motel when necessary for a night or two, or even visiting a well known park, but I’m hardly enthusiastic about the possibility either. Even if I had to take an aeroplane due to reasons of time, I’d probably pack a hammock for forest camping  and rent a car so I could get away from the cities and developed areas as quickly as possible.

I am sure there are similar opportunities like that in the Rockies and even Arizona and Utah. Actually I know there is, they are called BLM and Forest Service lands. And there is a whole activity called boondocking. But despite the vastness of Western US, I am also aware how popular many parts of the West, and how unaccessible many other parts of West are once you get far away enough from the popular tourist destinations and big cities of West that bring out the crowds to back country. Plus one of goals of these trips is to find out where I want to build or buy my off-grid cabin – with the high housing costs and limited privately-owned rural land in West – and fire danger I’m really kind of turned off by the West. The Western US is vast but the population overwhelmingly lives in cities and their suburbs, at even higher rates then much of the rest of the United States.

While I’ve been talking about it for some time – vague notions of visiting the Ozarks or South Dakota or maybe Idaho – truth is that I haven’t really made any serious plans on a route or destination. It’s a bit hard to plan such things when you want to avoid motels, campgrounds and popular tourist traps like the National Parks. Aeroplanes are expensive, as is renting a car, plus it seems werid to spend so much money if you’re not planning to visit the aforementioned places already photographed a million times and widely known. And most I’m lazy.

With a car or truck, and planning to spend much of your time in back country, you have a lot more flexibility then having to follow a train, bus, or aeroplane schedule, and you can bring much more gear and supplies. The only thing you have to rush against is daylight and the end of the trip.

There is a lot more to figure out. What good places to visit in the UP and Northern Wisconsin? It would be so easy to take an airplanes out Utah and go to designated viewing spots and stay at the designated motel at Zion National Park or wherever the tourist bureau insists I should visit, but I’m honestly not interested in that kind of trip, as I think you miss a lot by following a set agenda and visiting places that you can just watch a video from home on the internet. While scenic, my impression of Shenandoah National Park was boring and frankly quite pedestrian. And there is a lot more of America to see beyond what the experts think you visit.

A 53-week long year in 2026 📆

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Most years have 52 weeks.

Next year (2026) has 53 weeks rather then 52 weeks. The last time that happened was in 2020.

2005, 2009, 2015, 2020, 2026, 2032 are 53 week years.

This only happens on years when New Years Day is a Thursday, except when it’s a leap year and New Years Day is on a Wednesday.