Well, I traded in the old Audi A6 and the Mazda B3000 truck and $900 for a 1998 Ford F-150. It's an amazing deal, I haven't seen one that fit my needs so exactly. It's a 3 door, extended cab, 4x4, (electronic), power everything, loaded, full length bed, and in decent shape, all for around $8000!
I'm very excited, Molly likes it, we put the whole family in it and were quite comfortable.
So, the first day of ownership of my new truck, toward the end of the day I decide to take my kids out for a ride in it. 6 Miles away, there is a dirt logging road that goes to some disused gravel pits and logging areas. We tool on over there and drive down the road.
After a while, I get to a section that for some reason is covered in soft sand, looks pretty deep. I chuck it into 4WD, drive though, and take it out back into 2wd. Suddenly, the cabin... starts to stink. Real bad, like. A definite organic smell, not mechanical. The smell got worse and worse, the kids started gagging and holding thier noses. I rolled down the window, and was hit with a solid wall of stench. Rolled it right back up!
The smell... it was almost like really fresh dog shit from a dog suffering from a long, terrible disease, but worse. It was like shit that had died. It was like fresh dog shit that had somehow aquired a corporeal body, and gotten morbidly obese, contracted leprosy, and rotted, while living, until it finally died in a bubbling miasma of shit and rotted flesh, and then that mess putrefied in the hot sun for a day or so. It was a bad, bad smell. I actually wondered if the car was cursed, Amityville Horror-style, and the stench was an evil spirit about to warn us to "geeet ooouuuutt"
We hightailed it out of there as fast as we could, me thinking the forest had suddenly started to stink, but as we kept going I realized that we had probably run over something... nasty. Aftre 5 minutes of all of us breathing through our shirts trying to not choke or throw up, I pulled over to check the tires and wheel wells. Each one stunk a lot, some more than others, I don't know exactly which, my mind was in a state of disconnected horror. I tell you, it took all of my dedicated fatherhood to not abandon the kids, truck and all right there just so I could get a little fresh air. I didn't see any actual evidence of anything other than some moisture on random underside parts.
Anyway, after some experimentation I found out that the stink had not hit the vent intakes, so I could run fresh air through the cabin and keep the windows closed, and inside eventually got normal-smelling. I decided to find a car wash that had some kind of underside wash, fired up the Garmin, which led us, literally, on a 70 mile goose chase of nonexistent car washes until Mrz Jamz called up wondering where the blue blazing fuck we were, and told me that there was a car wash a mile or so from where we were. Oh, and that we had passed one a couple miles away from the logging road.
The car wash didn't help much, by the way, but all the driving did. Smell went away aftre a couple of days.
