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My truck was on fumes today. Filled it up. Took two tries because the pump shuts off when you hit $75.00. Now I accept I’ll being paying more at the pump because of what I’ve chosen to drive. But, sheesh, this is getting a tad ridiculous. I’m aware that at some point I may be looking back on this as having it good. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
Oh, and my truck takes regular. In case you were wondering. Which you probably weren’t.
This was a great car. I kinda hated to see it go, but it was time.
Driving a Bugatti Veyron at 253mph. A million dollar, one thousand and one horsepower supercar. Insanity.
So my new Nissan Titan truck is a Flexible Fuel Vehicle (FFV), which means it can run on e85, a mixture of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline. “Ethanol is a high octane, liquid, domestic and renewable fuel, produced by the fermentation of plant sugars. In the United States, ethanol is typically produced from corn and other grain products, although in the future it may be economically produced from other biomass resources such as agricultural and forestry wastes or specially grown energy crops.”
I finally got around to looking for an e85 fuel station. Do’h. Not gonna happen. At least for now. There’s one in Berkeley (insert Berkeley joke here) and one in Livermore. Dammit. So much for using e85 in my truck in the near future. Maybe they’ll put a filling station somewhere in San Jose one of these days. If so, I’m happy to go out of my way to use it, but Berkeley or Livermore? Yeah, right.
Ok that’s not as random as it sounds. I’ve been working with a broker for this purchase – Dave Sutch of mycarguy-sf.com. He was searching and searching for the truck I wanted for a few weeks. This was after my months and months of research and driving other vehicles. This one won out with the right combo of features for me. I really love this truck. It’s a Nissan Titan LE 4×4 CrewCab and it has pretty much every feature available from the factory, and then some. I love the color. It’s called Red Brawn. I’m not sure the pictures really do it justice. I’ll take some more shots tomorrow and some shots of the interior too. The shot(s) below I took really really quickly because it was about 105 out there and I had been traveling all day and despite my pleasure at buying the new truck and looking forward to the road trip home, and despite enjoying the Texas sized hospitality – I was about ready to burst into flames and then kill somebody and then burst into flames again. But I had to take a picture of my new friend Buddy Wood. And the truck at the Dealer. Buddy’s been with Nissan for like 35 years. Insanity.
I know what you’re thinking now though. Texas! Get back to the Texas part! So here’s the deal. Finding this truck was a difficult process basically because I’m off my nutt and am so damn particular about what I wanted (also for some other reasons 
. Dave Sutch definitely earned his fee with this job and then some! And then some more! I really apprciate the job he did for me on this one. He really went above and beyond. Thanks Dave! Anyway, we couldn’t find the truck on the west coast, we had a false positive in Denver, and finally we found the truck in Dallas. That’s the short version. There was much checking and double checking and further checking and a couple of false alarms. I think Dave and I were both ready to pull our hair out. 
Also there was some bidness about the factory cash, my financing expiring, and the 2007’s coming out that really made it worth my while to take this deal. I got an unbelievably great deal. I’ll tell you about it offline if you want to know. But I would have paid thousands more if I had ordered it.
So while the truck wasn’t exactly the truck I originally wanted, it’s nearly so. The only difference was the interior color and when I saw my new truck, I was hard pressed to remember why I wanted the other interior. I’m super happy. My new truck has kind of a two tone gray on gray leather interior that really looks great. I don’t know why I was so fixated on the interior color. I think I over thought it, or it didn’t look good on the trucks I saw when I was test driving. Maybe the color combos didn’t work as well on those trucks. Dunno.
So right now I’m staying at the Weston near the Dallas/Ft Worth airport. I had intended to get started back today, but after my flight out this morning, and after spending nearly four hours at the dealership, I was nearly willing to trade the truck I just bought for a long hot shower and some pink bunny slippers. Ok, just the bunny slippers. (Hmm, that doesn’t even make sense). So I’m here in Dallas and I’m wasted and I’m heading to bed to get up at the crack of dawn and head home. By the way, it’s about 1700 miles. So I’ll probably do 1690 miles tomorrow and 10 on Sunday.
I’ll blog more about this tomorrow if I can find some wifi.
More pictures here.
P.S. The only bummer about this adventure is that I had to embark on it alone. B. couldn’t make it. I wish she was here!