Walt, Asheville. retired from the county schools, bus garage, so i've driven big things, just never one i lived in. my wife passed two years ago and this is the trip we didn't get to take. i won a 2017 Winnebago Journey 40R in June on a sealed bid through m&a. it was at a lender yard outside Salt Lake City. carol asked me to write down how i got it home, because that was the hardest decision of the whole thing.
the math. Salt Lake to Asheville is about 2,000 road miles. the first 1,000 miles of delivery cost nothing and each mile beyond runs 70 cents, so roughly 1,000 extra miles came out to about 700 dollars on the invoice. against that, flying out myself: a one-way ticket around 290, a cab to the yard, then 2,000 miles at maybe 8 miles a gallon is 250 gallons of diesel, at the 3.70 i was seeing that's over 900, plus four or five nights at campgrounds, plus food, plus a week. call it 1,600 and a week of my life on I-70 and I-40 in a coach i'd never driven, over the Rockies first thing.
so it wasn't close. i took the delivery the m&a people offered. it showed up 15 days after my wire.
insurance. this is the part nobody told me. my agent said to bind coverage the day the wire goes, with the VIN, not the day it arrives. once that money moves, it's my coach, even if somebody else is driving it. it cost me two weeks of premium on a coach i hadn't seen. cheap for the sleep.
what the driver checked. he called the day before. when he got here he walked around it with me with a clipboard, the same sheet he'd filled out at pickup, with photos on his phone from the yard. tires, every panel, the windshield, the mirrors. he wrote the odometer down in front of me. 2,061 miles more than the listing. we both signed. then he showed me the jacks and the slides and where the generator start is, which i didn't expect. took about 40 minutes.