Blue View – Bye, Bye Blue

Courtesy of pikisuperstar / Freepik

We interrupt the long hiatus from our regularly scheduled blogs to bring you this breaking news…

Marcie and I have sold Blue, our Ford Transit camper conversion! We’ve been contemplating this for awhile now, and finally made the decision over the holidays. We put ads on CraigsList and FB Marketplace, and accepted an offer less than a week later. Marcie and I took one last roadtrip to deliver Blue to his new owners in Sacramento.

Blue has new home now.

The decision was painful; maybe not as painful as when we sold our sailboat, Nine of Cups, after 18 years aboard… but painful nonetheless. There were several motivating factors that led to the decision:

• Local use. Blue was great for road trips and camping, but wasn’t very good for daily trips around town. One plus was that we could always find him in a parking lot; he was taller than most other vehicles, and we could always spot his unique dark blue color. On the negative side, he was difficult to maneuver in tight parking lots; too tall for most parking garages – or our garage at home; and he wasn’t very fuel efficient around town. I suppose we could have bought a second vehicle for daily, in-town use, but we found it hard to justify having two vehicles, one of which would always be sitting idle for weeks or months at a time.

• Ford service departments. Blue has spent an inordinate amount of time in the shop, either for the numerous recall items he’s had or for warranty repairs. It would be annoying enough to be without our vehicle for a day or two during his frequent visits to the shop, but the average time Blue spent in the garage for each repair was 12 days! Our two closest dealers here in Las Vegas were the worst, mainly because they did not make appointments – it was first come first serve. When dropping him off for a recall item or repair, the usual response to the question of how long it would take was usually something like “We’ll get a chance to take a look at your vehicle in a week or so, then we’ll let you know how long the repair will take. Probably 10 days or so total unless we have to order parts”. Of course, no loaners were available unless we had purchased the “Premium Maintenance and Warranty Package” available from the dealer. The thought of selling him, however, really began to develop last fall when he was in the shop for seven weeks – six of which were waiting for the tech to get to him and one week for the repair. Of the dozens of vehicles I’ve owned in 56 years of driving, Blue was the first Ford I ever owned, and it will be a long time, if ever, before I buy a Ford again, based on my experience with Ford service departments. (A caveat - of the 6-8 dealers we’ve dealt with, there were two exceptions to the above. The dealers in Coeur d'Alene, ID and in Woodland, CA were quite good. Both allowed us to make appointments, completed the work in a timely fashion, and pretty much did what I’d like to expect from a service department.)

• The fun was in the upfitting. We really enjoyed our frequent road trips and Blue was an excellent camping platform. We had pretty much completed his build-out and upfit, and had him configured just the way we wanted him. There wasn’t much left to do, other than take him on trips and enjoy him. What I discovered, however, was that I took as much pleasure in the planning, construction and upfitting as I did in making use of him.

Blue’s interior was pretty much done

So, after much discussion, we made the decision, put Blue on the market and sold him… but not without some thoughts on what we’ll do next. We’ve decided on another big project, one that we think will be fun and interesting. Stay tuned as we resume our blogs next week and talk about our plans “Post-Blue”.