They currently meet on Saturdays at lunch so we could leave after breakfast, be there by lunch, and be home before dinner.

@Ned Carey  in addition one needs to have nexus lexus and be an expert at skip tracing.out our way the bigger players in this tend to be private detectives..and in many areas the counties make it darn tough as they don't like to see middle men taking 50% of peoples money.... this is an old Guru program that has kind of come and gone.

I have been out of the country, so I skipped January. 

I must have skipped over that post.

As such I'm like a non-stop freight train going 100mph till I eventually crash and say, "I'm skipping today my Brain isn't working anymore."

However from what I can see most truck drivers on the road don't just fill up and leave, you've got about 200 gallons of diesel and your travelling from NY to CA, you're probably not going to be in a hurry to get on the road especially since your probably driving 8-14 hours a day.I've also noticed that most of these drivers spend the night in the parking lot in their trucks, thus this location also has a diner and can serve dinner as well as breakfast the next morning.

I suggest you skip this one. 

If you are confident you can also do the deal yourself saving agent fees for the seller (if it's the FSBO) and I guess you can skip the appraisal if you want to.  

If they are going to be lazy. skip steps, do a half as% effort then they have a lot to lose.If the first commission check is 50,000 then they have already paid 25,000 so would get the full 50,000 as an example.Unfortunately most of these mediocre brokers and agents do not have hardly any money to their name and want you to TRUST their words.

As I always suggest, take a tax lien focused Iowa attorney to breakfast or lunch to get a good handle on the process.At a high level, some Iowa tax lien rules are;that you earn 2% per month on the tax amount paidyou bid the percentage of "interest" in the property.