Road trip to Oregon for a cop car?

I helped a friend retrieve a car he had purchased on EBay for a killer deal this weekend so I figured I would post the trip here. The car was located in Sweet Home Oregon. He debated about driving up there with a trailer and hauling it home or flying up there and driving it back. We opted to fly up there. We both fly for free so it ended up being a lot cheaper to do that. The way flights worked out, we ended up flying to Seattle crashing for the night and then catching the first flight to Eugene Oregon. This was the view outside the hotel window. It was amazingly quiet in the room for being this close to the airport gates.

 I had to take a picture of the taxis in Seattle for Isaac. He really dislikes prius's. I told him that if he gets bad grades or acts up the only car that he will get to drive in high school will be a prius. His grades are always good!

 Bright and early we hit the sky's in this Q400. I generally dislike prop airplanes but these have enough room that they aren't all that bad.

 We flew over Mount St. Helen's and it reminded me of the time Dixie and I went there when I was working in Seattle. That was a fun trip.

You get a good view of the landing gear in this airplane. We only bounced once on landing. That wasn't too bad because the last time I flew on a Q400 we bounced 3 times before we were on the ground.

 We had a 40 minute drive from Eugene to Sweet Home. We had to rent a car and before we hit the road we had to go to the DMV. It was a typical DMV with all the lines and weird people that always seem to be at the DMV. Ha Ha. We got a temporary permit for the car and then went to Costco for a battery. We knew we had to put a battery in it and Costco was the best deal. I could not believe how many people were in that Costco. I have never seen one that busy in my life. We were going to get some things while we were there but when we saw the crowd we decided to just get the battery and then we got the heck out of there.

 This was the first time we laid eyes on the clean one owner that my buddy had purchased.

 It is a 2009 Impala that spent the first part of it's life as a police car for the Sweet Home Oregon police department. It has 113,000 miles on it and it needed a battery. That was all we knew about it other then some pictures we saw on ebay. I asked the police women how long it had been decommissioned and she said it hasn't been driven since august. Ian changed the battery out while I wondered if the ethanol gas that had been in it since august would be any good.

 It fired right up so that raised my hopes.

We did a quick walk around, checked the tires and the fluids and decided we needed to go to O'reilly's for some stuff.

 It was a little bit low on anti freeze so we bought some at o'reillys and topped it off. We also filled up the windshield fluid, checked the air pressure on the tires, aired up the spare tire and got some fuel additive to help out the old fuel that was in it.

 Ian also figured it would be a good idea to check the alternator while we were there, It was putting out 14+ amps so we were good to go.

  A quick fill up of fuel and we hit the road with the impala and the rental car. We had to go back to the Eugene airport to drop off the rental. I saw this mural as we were filling up with gas and had to get a picture. Logging must be big there because we passed a ton of logging trucks along the way.

We didn't get on the road home until after 2 PM. The impala ran great other then a slight vibration between 60 to 70 miles per hour. It didn't bother us much because in Oregon the speed limit was 55, Nevada was 75 and Utah was 80. Here is our first stop for gas. I thought the garage there was awesome. Oregon is a funny state. They don't let you fill up your own gas. I guess it's an environmental issue or something. This garage is in Paisley Oregon. It was a little tiny town along the way. We decided to get gas there because there wasn't another gas station for 250 miles.

 Here is the inside of the garage. It was pretty cool.

 It was long into the night when we finally hit the border of Nevada which is what this photo was suppose to show. It's kind of blurry though. We couldn't believe how desolate the roads were. We passed about 6 cars the whole time from Paisley, Oregon to Winnemucca. I checked my cell phone a few times along the way and there were many places that showed no service. I was really glad we didn't break down out there. Anyways we stopped in Winnemucca for the night because we started seeing aliens out in the desert. Ha Ha.

 We hit the road early the next morning. The weather was great there. Here is the main strip.

We ate at this diner and the food was really good. I would go back there anytime I am passing through and I highly recommend it if you find yourselves in Winnemucca.

 The road that goes on and on. We really lucked out because the weather was perfect and we never ran into any problems with traffic.

 These tunnels are just outside of Elko. This was the second tunnel we hit on our trip. The first one was back in Oregon.

 Just beginning to see the salt flats.

Hitting Wendover and finally back in Utah. Woo Hoo, almost home now.

 Here it is home at Ian's house. I told him if he keeps buying cop cars his neighbors will think he became a cop. It should be a good car with a little bit of cleaning. It ran great and the spot light came in handy as we were driving at night to keep an eye out for deer and other wildlife. Luckily, we didn't hit anything other then a bunch of bugs.

 So 46 hours, 2 flights, 2 hotels, 4 states, 1 rental car, 1 battery, 900 driven miles, 30 gallons of gas, and 1/2 gallon of anti freeze later we were home. I deem this road trip a huge success. Ian and I have had road trip failures also. He bought a truck in Oklahoma City a few years back and we flew out there to retrieve it. That ended up with a broken down truck in tucumcari, new mexico. We ended up renting a uhaul truck, driving it to albuquerque (because there are no rental cars in tucumcari) and catching a flight home to SLC. Long story short we drove a truck and trailer back to tucumcari, loaded the truck and trailered it home. That was quite the adventure and as fun as that was, I am glad this one was a little less eventful. Check back and see what other adventures come along the way in the future!