The mystery machine lives... and dies.

So a number of years ago I purchased a 1969 Dodge Sportsman Van also know as an A-108. I was the third owner of the van. The original owner bought it off a new car lot in '69/'70 and kept it in immaculate condition, always in cover storage, oil changes every 3,000 miles, did some restoration work to keep up with the times (captains chairs for the driver/front passenger, and kept every single receipt over the years to prove it. Well he and his wife decided to sell it for a number of reasons, lacked power steering, was a little over kill for a grocery runs, etc. So a friend of mine bought it... and wrecked it after owning it for less then a month. I literally think she crashed it the 3rd day she owned it. She totaled the front end and had no intention of fixing it, nor selling it (even after I offered exactly what she just paid for it pre-wreck).

About a year later I get random call from her asking if I was still interested in the van. I said sure and she told me I could have it for $100 if I picked it up that day, otherwise the city was impounding because it hadn't moved from the front of her house in over a year. So I called a tow truck, had him meet me at her place, picked up the van and parked it in front of my parents yard. I can't really remember how long it was there but I do recall the grass under it died (any botanist out there can comment on how long it might have been there).

At this point the front end was crushed, the wheels wouldn't even roll, it had sat for a year in the sun so the interior was getting crispy and the whole thing had a lovely 'new gasoline' smell. Yeah the one we all know and love. So the next steps were to [a] find a new front end to replace the old one with [2] find someone to cut off the wrecked part and replace it for cheap, it wasn't like I was working for some crazy company like Google so this was going to be super budget. I needed it to run so I could drive it.

Well It just so happened my wife (girlfriend at the time) has an uncle who ownes an auto body shop call Auto Art in Escondido. He agreed to do a little work on the van for me. Well actually he did a lot of work, removing and replacing the entire front end.

I still needed to have a smog check get license plate lights and some other random thing I can't recall. Well I did the smog, the random thing but could never find the license plate lights. So I kept driving it on a temp registration you know the paper kind that you have to tape in the back window (would they just make these things stickers???). After about a year the DMV stopped giving me these temp registration flyers and said I needed to fix the issues or stop driving the van... so I just decided to keep on driving. The temp registration was so faded no one could read when it actually expired so I figured I was fine. I never found the lights but I did learn that Escondido has a very lenient DMV and one of the nice women there said to bring my paper work in and she would take care of me. I thought how nice. So I ran home jumped in the van and drove to the DMV. I'm driving down the street in this huge unregister inconspicuous van and a friendly Five-O wants to chat. He gave me the usual lecture and told me he was impounding my van. Ugg. Well that was the final straw. I had to get the van out of the impound lot and parked in my garage. The city can tow unregistered vehicles from the street or your driveway at anytime so I had to hide the goods so to speak. In the garage it went and there it stayed. That is until I moved to Northern California at which point it came out of the garage, was loaded on a flat bed and taken to a storage facility in Fremont which was to become it's new home for the foreseeable future...