Germany Seemed Like a Good Idea

“Germany.”

The word came out of my mouth before I had even fully thought it through.

I was standing in the driveway again looking at the car I had shipped over from Florida. Two years in France and the thing still didn’t have plates. Eighty thousand dollars of German engineering sitting there like the world’s most expensive lawn ornament because the EU didn’t like the chassis.

Germany. Of course. This was a brilliant idea.

There are U.S. Army bases in Germany. The Americans stationed there don’t have to deal with the European registration circus. Maybe I could sell it there.

Why hadn’t I thought of that before?

I started making calls and eventually found a dealership near Kaiserslautern that specialized in exactly this kind of thing. The man on the phone spoke perfect American English and didn’t sound the least bit concerned about the car’s complicated European status.

I gave him the VIN. He called me a couple hours later, we did a video tour of the car and he was in. But I had to get it over there, and I needed a firm offer. He emailed one over to me.

Just like that, the problem that had been sitting in my driveway for two years suddenly had a solution. But I still needed a way home from there.

Fortunately, my buddy Bernard had already solved that part of the problem. He had found a used car that would work perfectly for two dogs and a partner with a weakness for buying French furniture at brocantes. It was at a dealership outside Cologne. I liked it, and since Bernard spoke German and I needed a second driver anyway, the whole thing seemed to line up neatly.

The plan was simple. I would meet Bernard in Nancy and we would drive up to Cologne together. We would buy the car, grab lunch, and then both head south to Kaiserslautern near the US Army base, where I would finally get rid of the one I had brought over. After that I would drop Bernard back in Nancy on my way home.

From there I would continue on to Reims, dinner by 7:30, open a proper bottle of champagne to celebrate the end of this two-year automotive adventure, get a good night’s sleep, and then make the five-hour drive back home the next morning in my new car.

It was, in my mind, a very tidy plan.

We arrived at the dealership a little before eleven for the appointment. The place sold nothing but high-end cars. Bentleys, Range Rovers, the sort of inventory that told you immediately who their customers were. My sensible used Volvo was going to look like it had wandered into the wrong party.

As we headed inside, a salesman was leaning against his desk on his phone. He looked like he had stepped straight out of one of those old Sprockets sketches from Saturday Night Live — slick hair, tight clothes, and the kind of nightclub energy that suggested he probably knew the doorman at every velvet rope in Cologne.

Bernard handled most of the conversation in German. He had lived in Germany for ten years and was far more comfortable navigating this situation than I was. I stood there smiling politely while trying to follow the rhythm of the discussion.

I didn’t need to understand German to know something wasn’t right. I could hear it in Bernard’s tone and see it on his face.

He turned to me and said quietly, “The car isn’t ready.” The dealer had told him the man who handled registrations was over at the German DMV getting the plates.

“When will they be here?” I asked.

Bernard listened for a moment, then looked back at me.

“Soon,” he said.

“They have known since Monday that we would be here,” I said. “Today is Thursday. We have an appointment.”

The salesman answered Bernard immediately, which struck me as interesting because Bernard had not translated what I had just said.

We stepped outside to talk.

“What do you want to do?” Bernard asked.

I looked back at the showroom window where the Volvo was still sitting exactly where it had been all morning. “I guess we wait,” I said. “This whole thing is already in motion. They’ve got me over a barrel.”

Bernard shook his head. “They have known since Monday we were coming.”

I shrugged. “German efficiency may be more of a marketing campaign.”

We went back inside and asked again when the registration guy would return with the plates. The salesman made a quick phone call and told Bernard the man would be back around three.

Three.

That was interesting, because a few minutes earlier the answer had been “soon.” Another small crack.

Bernard and I stepped aside again and talked it through. My appointment in Kaiserslautern to sell the old car was at four o’clock. That meeting mattered more than anything happening in Cologne. If I missed it, the whole plan collapsed.

There was only one workable option. I would drive south and keep the appointment. Bernard would stay behind, wait for the plates, and bring the new car down once the paperwork was finished.

We went back to the salesman and explained the plan. That was when he mentioned one more detail. Before anything else could happen, I needed to wire the money. Now.

I had no choice. I stared at the screen, twenty-eight thousand euros hovering over the send button. My thumb hesitated. Bernard caught my eye and gave the smallest nod: this is Germany, this is how it works. I hit send and felt the money leave like a bad bet at a casino I didn’t choose.

I left Bernard standing in the parking lot waiting on the paperwork and headed south toward Kaiserslautern.

The dealership near the base looked exactly the way you would expect.

American flags. Pickup trucks. A handful of English accents mixed with American ones. The place existed entirely for U.S. service members stationed there who wanted to buy a car in Europe and ship it home when their tour was over.

The man who handled the transaction was perfectly friendly. The kind of guy who clearly spent most of his day explaining financing to twenty-two-year-old soldiers.

After the manager finished looking over the Mercedes he nodded and confirmed we had a deal.

“Great,” he said. “You can hang out in the customer lounge while the girls finish the paperwork.”

Perfect.

It was about five o’clock. I walked over to the lounge, opened my laptop, and started working while they wrapped things up. The whole thing felt very routine, the way normal business transactions usually feel when everyone involved knows what they’re doing.

Around six I noticed the office beginning to wind down.

The women who had been working behind the desks started shutting down their computers and gathering their things.

I walked over.

“Where’s the paperwork?” I asked.

They looked slightly puzzled.

“The paperwork?” one of them said. “We emailed it to you.”

I blinked.

“That’s the paperwork?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “When do we sign something?”

“Oh,” she said cheerfully. “That’s already taken care of.”

Which left one final detail.

“So,” I asked, “where is my money?”

At that point the manager I had negotiated with earlier walked over.

He was perfectly calm.

“Oh,” he said, “we mail the check in about a week.”

“Dude,” I said, “that might have been something worth mentioning before I drove all the way over here from France.”

From my perspective I had just handed over the car I drove there in, my check was apparently arriving sometime next week, and Bernard was still three hours north dealing with the German paperwork situation.

The manager didn’t seem particularly concerned about the timing of the check. From his perspective this was probably how the process always worked.

Then he asked if I wanted to stay and have some pizza and beers with the team. They were closing early to hang out as a team. I politely declined. The last thing I needed was a couple of beers in me before driving three hours through Germany in a car I didn’t know.

He nodded and said “Well actually, we are closing the dealership early tonight.” “How soon?” I asked. “Now” he came back as if it were no big deal.

“Is there somewhere nearby I can wait for my ride?” I asked. He mentioned a Mexican place a little way down the street.

So I slung my backpack over my shoulder, grabbed my overnight bag, and headed out to walk the streets of Kaiserslautern dressed in Casual Friday clothes with my backpack and overnight bag like a hobo businessman.

I stopped at an ATM to grab some cash and figured I should probably tell Bernard I was no longer at the dealership. I looked at my phone, no signal. Nothing

Orange had confidently assured me my phone plan worked throughout the European Union. I had checked before I left. Apparently, Germany had quietly left the EU sometime that afternoon. Which meant I needed Wi-Fi.

I needed a signal, I decided to head back to the dealership and stand next to their showroom window, maybe I could hook back into their Wi-Fi. Then, it started to rain. So there I was in a military town, standing under an awning next to the closed dealership, hijacking their Wi-Fi so I could try to contact Orange while rain ran down the back of my neck.

Eventually I realized stealing Wi-Fi from a closed dealership in the rain was not a long-term strategy. It was cold. Plus, this was stupid.

I had passed a Pizza Hut several times while wandering around trying to figure out what to do. I hadn’t been to a Pizza Hut in thirty years. But they would definitely have Wi-Fi.

I walked in, dropped my backpack and overnight bag into a big booth and claimed it like a refugee setting up camp. A young woman came over and handed me a menu. I pointed to one of the local beers and said, “I’ll have that one.”

“Oh, we don’t have beer,” she said. In Germany.

So I ordered a Diet Coke, asked for the Wi-Fi password, and reconnected to the world. After grabbing something not too pleasant to eat, my phone started ringing. It was Virginie.

She had been following the entire adventure from France and had now realized that Bernard had been awake since before dawn and had already spent the entire day on the road.

“You cannot let him drive home tonight,” she said firmly. She was right.

Nancy was still a long drive north, and Bernard had already pushed himself far enough for one day. So that was that. Earlier, I had already come to terms that my Reims adventure wasn’t happening. Now, I was booking two hotel rooms in what looked like a decent hotel near the autoroute in Nancy where Bernard and I would spend the night like two traveling salesmen who had made a series of questionable decisions.

Eventually I began to sense that the Pizza Hut staff felt I had probably enjoyed their hospitality long enough. After a couple of hours in the Pizza Hut siphoning their Wi-Fi, I had finally received confirmation that Bernard was on his way down from Cologne.

So I packed up my laptop, slung my backpack over my shoulder, grabbed the overnight bag, and stepped back outside. It was still raining.

Fortunately, there was a large awning that ran along the front of the building. I stood there under it, grateful to be out of the rain, calculating roughly when Bernard might arrive. If he had left the dealership shortly after calling me, I figured I might only have fifteen or twenty minutes left to wait.

Maybe the worst of the day was finally over. That was when I discovered why the awning was so large. It wasn’t there for people waiting out the rain.

It was where the customers came to smoke their cigarettes to try and combat the bloating from finishing a Pizza Hut meal. Within a few minutes a steady stream of smokers began drifting out the door and gathering under the awning beside me as I held steady in the smallest slice of covered concrete trying to stay dry and trying to breathe.

Eventually headlights pulled into the parking lot. Relief washed over me immediately.

Bernard stepped out of the Volvo looking exactly the way a man should look after leaving his house at five in the morning, spending the entire day fighting with a German car dealer, and then driving three hours through the rain. Exhausted.

He stretched his back and nodded toward the Volvo. “The car drives most agreeable,” he said. Which, coming from Bernard, is the sort of understated review that usually means things went reasonably well.

By the time we got to the hotel in Nancy it was after midnight. Bernard asked if I wanted a beer. Did I ever. He talked to the gentleman closing down the bar to bring us two large, cold beers.

Bernard looked exhausted. I probably did too. Between the two of us we had covered most of western Germany that day chasing a solution to a problem that had been sitting in my driveway for two years.

The champagne evening in Reims had quietly disappeared somewhere along the way, replaced by a perfectly ordinary hotel near the autoroute in Nancy.

But as I sat there drinking that beer it occurred to me that, for the first time since the whole saga had begun, the Mercedes was no longer my problem. After two years of paperwork, mechanics, inspections, and conversations with people who all seemed slightly confused about the car’s existence, it had finally disappeared into the American military system somewhere in Germany.

At breakfast, Bernard was chipper. I was wrecked. Over coffee I asked how he ended up getting the owner to surrender the car. He told me “They never did have plates for your car. When I told them I wasn’t leaving without the car, they took plates off another one. French plates. Just… drive very carefully home.”

So I drove back to France on borrowed plates, wondering how much prison time that earned me if I got stopped.

When I got back home, I went straight to the garage that worked on my other car. Garages in France also register your car for you. The owner of the garage, David, looked it over and frowned. He pointed at the glass. “Monsieur,” he said, “the plate numbers etched into the windows do not match the plates on the car.”

In France the license plate number is permanently tied to the vehicle.

This Volvo had plates from the Mercedes the German dealer pulled from one of his other cars. David was worried that they had done something illegal and sold me a different car. I had to play stupid. I hadn’t been sold the wrong car. I had just bought it from the wrong dealer.