Ladies & gentlemen,
After months and months spending several hours behind the screen daily in search for “the one”, I am finally blessed with my superb Christmas present.
The search on all car sites in Holland, Belgium, Germany and France narrowed down to the conclusion, that the real thing was only available in the country of its origin. Well maintained, full option, low milage, automatic, the right colour combination for me, where as I realize some high demands.
“But the steering wheel is on the wrong side (:0)” ….”how am I going to organize that”…”will it be excepted by the Dutch DVLA…”who can help me out with this”….where some thoughts that crossed my mind. Together with a lot of other ones as one can imagine.
Gumtree, CarandClassics, Ebay and other sites had a lot of visits from my IP address. A couple of times I was near, via the members cars for sale, but it did not work out. Finally I noticed something via a very new channel for me: Twitter. Yes, never thought of that. Problem: I could not contact the owner directly. Help, what to do, seemed that I needed to twitter “tweets” myself and naming the Twitter account name of the owner, hoping that he would get a notification of that. Ok, what must be done, must be done. No result, even after several days of tweeting my heart out. I finally wanted to give up, when a message appeared. We had contact and even better, the car was indeed for sale, great!
But, a thousand KM away from my home, makes a quick view and inspection hard. Maybe my fellow members can help me out here, but none of them where in the near of the owners residence. Let’s first see how far we can come via distance communication…after all it is almost 2019.
It took some weeks of communicating via whatsapp, twitter, email and phone, images and a walkthrough video. Need to say that for me it is always important that the deals I do must be satisfying for both parties, so all was done with extra attention to that. Asking price was high, but fair in my opinion. Contacts with the Dutch DVLA, Rover garages, an English guest at our Holiday park and members of our forum crystallized the list of things to do and to arrange. A friendly invitation of member Eric60 to come to his house for a visit to talk about some things how to import / export a car, and a test drive in his RHD car, convinced me to do it. Thanks Eric60!
Full HPI & MOT check, purchase contract, international transport and more are items that came next. My wife is in need of some extra attention after this adventure.
My youth dream coming true, resulting last Thursday afternoon in the arrival of my dream car:
I
proudly present, my first 75 Connoisseur 2,5 V6, Moonstone green with deep sea green leather interior. Can’t take my eyes of it, what a beauty! The first of maybe a collection.
Regards from Holland,
Emiel
