So, yesterday I took a drive to the southwestern corner of Ohio (I live in central Kentucky) to take a look at a 2002 Laredo. I knew things were not going to go well when I arrived at a dealership that looked a lot more like a junkyard than it should. It only took a few moments to find the Jeep I was looking for, and only a few minutes more to see the pictures posted online made it look a lot better than it looked in real life. Meanwhile, there was some guy checking out a Japanese SUV which had a notable miss and obviously burned oil. He told me not to bother with trying to talk with anybody there. I tried anyway, and found a hang-dog looking guy in a dirty t-shirt in what passed for an office, where some other guy was walking around practically shouting at somebody on the phone. After making sure we had indeed found the right Jeep, we left. Shortly afterward I turned the wrong direction on US 50 and explored more of southern Ohio than I had originally bargained for.

Our next stop, once I got my bearings straight, was a place I thought I had seen a WJ earlier. As it turned out, the dealership had six or seven WJs on the lot. (I found out later that all of them had the 4.0, which was fine, since that is what I'm looking for.) HOWEVER, it was also clear nothing on the lot had moved in months. We finally found the guy who ran the place, and he studiously avoided showing us the ones we actually wanted to look at. Instead, he showed us one which not only had two flat front tires, but those tires were dry-rotted. Another had no driver's seat. I finally prevailed upon him to start another one up, which REALLY needed to be detailed and had been sitting so long moss was beginning to take root on the pavement underneath it. He got it started with a jumper,and my wife got in and eventually coaxed the electric driver's seat far enough forward she could reach the pedals. She hit the brake pedal, got my attention, and then hit it again to show me the brakes were soft. About that time I noticed smoke coming from under the hood. When I looked and said something to the owner about it, he tried to tell me it was the valve cover gasket, and "They all do that." I pointed to the PCV and suggested that might be leaking, but he repeated his claim that it was the valve cover gasket. Now, I wasn't born yesterday. I know what the oil leaking from a valve cover smells like, and I know it the leak is big enough to produce the amount of smoke I was seeing, then the gasket was blown. Then there was the fact it smelled wrong to be smoke from an oil leak, and a few hour later it occurred to me that I was smelling burning brake fluid. A master cylinder leak would explain the soft brake pedal and the smell. My wife was both mad at and creaped out by the guy by the time we left.

Did I mention the bird's nest under the hood of another one he showed us? And the 4.0 covered with bird poo?

The next stop was at a dealer not far from where I live, just to look, because I'd never buy a car from the place. They had a positively filthy "JUST IN!!" '02 Laredo that had been used hard. I took it for a short drive and the first thing I found wrong was that the steering wheel pointed 45 degrees to the left (I am not exaggerating!), it pulled, and the brakes were squishy and didn't pump up. Pulling out into traffic I noticed the tranny felt a bit slushy, and on the way back, under medium acceleration, it jerked in the 2-3 shift. Of course, even though I told them I wasn't interested, and that I thought there were problems that made it unsafe to drive, they had to try to talk me into it. It was kind of a shame, because I liked the color, the engine was strong, and the AC worked great.

Ah, what a day.