THE SEARCH FOR THE PERFECT BUG: ROUND 2

Well after the failure of the 1962 baja, it was back to the drawing board. I was pretty disappointed that we got beat buying it, but I knew there were more out there. Now I really wanted to be able to just go out to the desert and tear up the place. I wanted a project with low to no work. It had to be at least 90% complete. I decided to narrow my search engine to just race-dezert.com's classifieds, knowing that all the cars on there were race legal. I found one immediately. It was a blue 5-1600 race car that the owner was trying to sell fast. There was only one problem, it was $8500. While $8500 may not seem like a lot of money to most, it was the top of our budget, and we were not comfortable spending all of our money on the car, and have no money left over if something was to go wrong with the car. We decided against buying it, but I was sill watching it everyday to see if the price would change. Well, the price didn't change. On a thursday afternoon I decided I would call Buck, and see if we could figure out some way to get it. He said the only way he would feel comfortable with it was if we could get it for $6000. That was $2500 less than the asking price, so I figured we were SOL. I said screw it, and texted the owner right after talking to Buck. I told him that we really liked his car, but all we could spend was $6000, he text me back right away saying that he'd take 6k if we could pick it up by saturday. I was so excited. We only had two days to pick it up(which was a seven hour round trip). On friday Buck and I were running around getting everything set to get the car. At 7AM on saturday morning we left our house for parker, towing a U-haul trailer, excited to bring our new baby home. We finally got to the owner's shop, and were excited as could be. The 5-1600 was beautiful, it was everything I had hoped it would be. It was finally the perfect car. The owner turned the car on, and the engine purred, it was a great sound. Finally he said the words that I had been waiting to hear since I got there, "wanna drive it?" I jumped in the drivers seat with Buck next to me. I turned it on and then tried to shift it into reverse....nothing. I tried again.... and again nothing happened. The owner jumped into the car and tried to put it into any gear, nothing. From that moment I could see it on Buck's face, it was a deal breaker. He knew that I was moving out to college the next weekend, and he didn't want the car to just sit. Walking away from that 5-1600 was a horrible feeling, but we both knew it was for the best....