Success at last. After weeks of trying to get quotes I have finally found our truck.
Earlier in the year I was told not to order before September, so I got some quotes from dealers in Oregon and was satisfied that they would confirm new pricing in September and order my truck.
Then we decided to buy the caravan (travel trailer) in Wabash and that meant if we buy the truck in Oregon we would have to travel across the country in both directions as we would have to register the truck and then pickup the caravan and bring it back to Oregon to register.
Obviously this was going to be a time consuming and expensive exercise. Instead we decided to try and buy the truck around Chicago. This meant I was back to square one and had to find friendly dealers that would give me a good price again. Unfortunately my experience has been that once the truck dealer realises you are not in the states many start thinking you are a scam artist or time waster and don't want to do much for you. Combine this with the time difference where I can only talk to them for a couple of hours in our morning and the process to buy the truck slows down to a crawl. So, after two weeks of trying to find someone that would give me a decent price for a factory order around Chicago the dealers started to say that due to the model change next year they could no longer order one and be confident it would be there in time.
I was then forced to give up on my plan for a factory order and start searching the Ram website for an already built truck. This was also a very time consuming process as the ram site only gives you 150 miles from a particular zip code and the truck we needed was fairly specific to be able to carry the large truck camper and tow a caravan. Finally I found the truck at a very good price. It is getting to be a bit of old stock as manufactured in February and someone dented the rear fender on the lot. The dent will be repaired by the dealer. As we intend to keep the truck for a long time neither of these issues bother us to much and the discount enabled us to buy the Big Horn instead of the lowest specified Tradesman.
We are now flying in to Kansas City - maybe check on Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz while we are there. Then we plan on driving up to Cedar Falls to pickup the truck camper before checking out Chicago and on to Wabash to pick up the caravan. After that we can check out a few more sites on the way back to Oregon to setup our base. We can only get a 30 day temporary registration tag from Kansas so must be back in Oregon in about three weeks to enable us to have a week to get everything registered in Oregon before the temporary plates expire.
