The day came to go to the mobile home manufacturer in Ocala, FL. I felt really sick but I knew that we needed to get this done, so I pushed through. Barely. We get there, we meet the salesman, and he seems kind of unprofessional. But we just assume it’s because he’s from the middle of nowhere and probably doesn’t have frequent contact with other humans. Whatever. So he hands us a paper and instructs us to go outside and check out all the mobile homes. For the ones we like, we are to write down the number on the front of the home and list what we like about it. Okay we thought, this should be easy and fun. And it was! We walked through and assumed, based on our prior conversation with him, that all these homes were within our price range. What. A. Steal. These homes were beautiful. Even better than our current home. How on earth was this possible? Again, whatever. He surely didn’t blatantly disregard our budget, so we continued to look through all the houses.
At this point, we had finished and we were down to two choices. We thought we would discuss it with him to see what he thought (dumb us, we should’ve known he would’ve chosen the more expensive one). Anyway, we’re sitting in his office and he goes on for about 30 minutes about his love of food (yeah buddy, we could tell) and he kept showing us pictures of all the food he made. We couldn’t be less interested, as this had nothing to do with buying a mobile home, which was the whole reason we were there, right? And Matt’s parents were with the kids, so we were hoping to get back to them at a decent time. Finally, the salesman starts talking business. Finally.
We presented him with our top two contenders, but I knew deep down which one I liked better: the smaller one. It was cuter. The layout was so much better. And honestly, the bigger one just wasn’t my style. It was gaudy. I’d rather have a 3×2 with style than a 4×2 that just looks…ridiculous. And completely overdone, mind you, for a mobile home. Of course, my choice wouldn’t profit the salesman as much so he tried talking me out of it. I finally told him: I don’t want to clean a 2,000+ sqft house. I have enough of a time keeping up with my house right now, which is much smaller. To that he replied: Well, you don’t have a job! What else are you going to do? We both kept our mouths shut for the sake of keeping the meeting as friendly as possible, but boy did some replies come to mind (and quite instantaneously, I might add).
So we continued the conversation and he finally got to the crux of it all: the price. The number he gave us was $135,000 over our budget. YES. You read that correctly. Yes, all the zeroes that are there belong. That was the moment I knew that this wasn’t going to workout like we planned. Not only did he lie about the housing selection being within our price range, but he also lied about helping us find land. Guess what? He didn’t even have a list of contenders for us when we arrived, as promised. Our final assessment of him: he was rude. He lacked class and professionalism. And every other word out of his mouth was foul. Bottom line, we felt uncomfortable and decided to tell him that we’d get back to him. We walked out those doors and couldn’t get to our car fast enough.
We left there feeling absolutely gross. Like, what the heck just happened? We just drove, speechless. We couldn’t come up with the words. Finally, I spoke up and told Matt that this all didn’t feel right. As much as I was willing to compromise, it felt like God was closing doors on our plans to stall New Zealand. After all, we just couldn’t secure land and the mobile home buying experience was just atrocious. For the first time, Matt looked at me and said, “You may be right. With this happening and with what we’ve been hearing at church, maybe this isn’t right. Maybe New Zealand is nearer”. Wait…did he just agree with me? Are we a step closer to being on the same page? Uh, yes! Wow!
Click for Part 3:
The Cullums Immigrate 
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