With the damage to the vehicles on the lot the first thing I had to do to take my mind away from the idea that well, we had some cars get seriously fucked up. One of the things was obviously clearing the fallen trees from the vehicles in order to better survey the damage and determine my next course of action. Among those plans is what I planned on doing with the Tracker, given the fact that the roof is folded in on itself. One of the things that I immediately thought about was the ad that I saved on facebook marketplace for a Chevy Tracker. This ad was saved several months ago and was for a truck that was nice and solid except for the apparently seized up engine. I felt that I needed to keep the ad saved despite the idea I wasn't trying to find another vehicle to rebuild ours, which had damage that was repaired, in a somewhat haphazard manner. The most I was trying to do was keep the truck running until it either died or something better came along and I sold the old truck off. Well maybe having a tree try to cut the truck in half the long way was God's way of saying, "hey, you don't need to keep trying to work on this POS, I'm gonna make sure you ain't gonna keep trying to hang on to this tore up truck.....CHOP!" Then when I checked and saw that the ad was still active after several months, I had to inquire about it. The truck was for sale for $600. The old lady that owned it still had it, and was willing to go down to $500. Either way, this was that silver lining that we was looking for. I cleared the scrap metal from the F250 and got my towing rig set up so we can go fetch this truck. When we got to the woman's house, we found that she was down a grade in a valley/ravine, which meant that we would have some problems retrieving the truck. The F250 has relatively shitty tires and is only 2WD. First thing I did was detach the trailer and leave it parked on the side of the driveway by the road. We went on down to check it out. While enjoying pleasant conversation with the lady who owned the truck, I checked it out and was more than pleasantly surprised at what we had before us. This truck's body was for all intents in excellent shape barring one small dent in the front few inches of the right front fender. All other panels were A-1, no rust, even the paint was decent still. The interior was just as good. All interior panels and seats were clean and solid except for the need of a vacuuming out. Hell, the truck didn't even stink inside like a lot of used cars tend to, especially when they've been sitting for a while. I was even pleasantly surprised to find that the truck had manual windows which were solid and worked fine. The truck had an aftermarket radio and a brand new spare tire complete with the factory cover. The rear left tire was flat so I swapped out the spare and found it needed air too. The engine even had other stuff that we needed to replace on ours after the past couple of accidents. There are also plenty of usable parts on and around the engine that I can salvage. My main intent is swapping out the dead engine with the crushed Tracker's good engine then stripping all of the usable parts from the crushed truck. Well obviously we went ahead and bought the truck, lightened our monetary load and got a title in its place. I hitched a tow chain to the truck and we commenced to drag the truck up the driveway. When we got to the incline, we made it about 3/4 of the way up before the F250's tires started spinning in the gravel. We backed up and made multiple attempts to try and get a running start up the driveway to no avail. At this point I had to get some more air in that low spare tire. I took the tire compressor pump from the F250 and attempted to use it in the Tracker (we brought the crushed truck's battery and installed it to verify everything else worked in the truck) but found that the fuse was dead and the plug was partially melted. After attempting to make a fuse out of a metallic ketchup packet (which almost worked by the way), I ended up cutting the shitty plug from the compressor and remembering how the cover behind the shifter where the 12v receptacle is at can be removed very easily, I pulled the cover loose and removed the two wires from the socket and just wedged the wires from the pump into them to get power to the unit so I can fill up the tire. Once the tire was pumped up pretty good we made another attempt at the incline. I gave the F250 a good push and with the Tracker being on all four filled up tires, I pushed like The Little Engine That Could and finally crested and got to where I was on level solid ground. With the Tracker on level ground as well I devised a plan where I would stage the little truck in the road, hook back up to the trailer then pull the trailer down the road a little bit, then give the Tracker a little push towards the trailer and line it up where I can get a rolling start and hopefully roll up most of the way. Luckily the neighbors for the old lady spotted us and offered to help push. Because of that we was able to get the car 3/4 of the way up on the trailer. I was able to use the little come-a-long to winch the thing the rest of the way onto the trailer. With that I was able to secure the Tracker to the trailer and load up so we can ride out. With the long relatively slow ride back home, we made a couple of stops we had to do before returning home. We did have to stage the truck at the beginning of the gravel road leading up to the house since it was kinda late and we didn't want to be doing any more fighting until morning. We left the rig parked right next to the gravel road on what appears to be solid ground. We will be unloading the Tracker and staging it along the driveway behind the El Camino aiming up at the garage so I can get an easy pull straight up there later when I'm ready. I will have to back the trailer back into its parking spot, hopefully not getting stuck on the soft ground in the process. At least though, we are on the road to recovery. Along with the shit load of firewood, we will have one car taken care of.
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