long distance q purchases

[JanDebL at aol.com]

The best way to do this is to have someone in the area (that you can trust 
their opinion and won't buy the car out from underneath you) look at the car 
and appraise it for you.  The Porsche club guys do it all the time - so it 
should also work for the Quattro guys.
I work for one of the airlines so I'm somewhat lucky that I can jump on a 
plane nearly anytime if I need to.  Last fall one of my friends was ready to 
buy an old muscle car  (after many phone conversations with salesman at the 
"Old Car World" and a dozen or so Internet photos) and have it shipped to MN. 
 I had been in this particular establishment before and I knew much of their 
business was shipping cars sight-unseen to Japanese customers so I had good 
feelings about them. However, because we could fly so inexpensively, we took 
a Saturday, flew to Seattle and checked it out.  The car was totally 
misrepresented - in fact it was a total POS not worth $3K  let alone the $22k 
they were asking for it. 
I'm not sure there is a moral to this story except to use every resource that 
is available and hopefully one of them will work.
Jan Lahtonen