Cars

[ase]

Saturday I roadtripped with hourglasscreate and her daughter to get Der Kid to Pennsic. According to google maps, this was 280-ish miles one-way. My excuse for coming along was simple: highway practice time! Der K. has her learner's, so drove about an hour in the lightest traffic. hourglasscreate took over until I wore her down outside the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and I let go the wheel just after the I-76/I-79 interchange. Three women, one Prius; it was long, but doable, with frequent breaks. The afternoon was complicated by an exasperating and inexplicable hot dog shortage and some nerve-wracking Jersey barriers - seriously, people, shoulders and margins are good things - but went fine until hourglasscreate declared herself sufficiently comfortable with my driving she could relax and stop watching the road. Five minutes later, the clouds rolled in on a mission, and ten minutes after that we were driving the I-68/I-70 region in a driving thunderstorm. So hourglasscreate did not get her nap, and I learned that it is entirely possible to drive through a thunderstorm while wearing sunglasses, if you're paying more attention to the road than your headache. We rolled into her driveway sometime before 8 PM and after 7 PM, twin shades of wiped out.

It's worth noting that, unlike the people on the northbound side of I-70 in the evening, we hit no traffic, even in construction zones. Extraordinary.

I have been completely spoiled by my auto experiences. I drove a Ford Windstar twice in my teen years. However the real formative driving experiences were norabombay's Mazda Millenna, a Toyota Prius, and a Saab 900. Then I drove a Ford Focus, and learned that my abstract musings that I was completely screwed for the "less thank $25k new" car market were an excellent extrapolation from concrete experience. (Seriously: the Focus I drove explained why people don't like driving. If I had to drive an economy car every day, I'd hate driving too.) So this summer I measure my grocery runs by how much I can carry on a bicycle, gauge my plans by how long it'll take to get me there on public transit - thanks, WMATA, for running that track maintenance, what, every weekend? Or just most of them? - sweat on buses with broken air conditioners - thanks, Ride On, two out of three times today, thanks so much - and count every mile I'm not driving in a $1,000 clunker as another fraction of gas, insurance, maintenance, repair, and car loan payments I'm not making until I can afford something pre-owned (complete with "oh, was that a support beam?" dents) and zippy. With working A/C.

(The first person to say, "why don't you get Zipcar?" will be bludgeoned with a my c.Jan 2008 driver's license, strapped around a handy brick, and the eligiblity requirements until January 2009 or they get the hint, whichever comes first.)

Our last Saturday stretch-and-bathroom break was the Hagerstown outlet mall, where I wandered into the Bose store and lusted after the $300 noise-cancelling headphones. The problem is that 1.) I do not have $300 for headphones, and 2.) I have a bad feeling they're tuned for the wrong frequencies. It's all booming jet engines, and I'm not sure that's going to work on the lower-midrange machine and fans-for-machines racket I'm really trying to filter out. There's also 3.) a tangent to be written on the social messages of bulky headsets vs earbuds, but you can probably unpack that yourselves.

Comments

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

Seriously: the Focus I drove explained why people don't like driving. If I had to drive an economy car every day, I'd hate driving too.

Ouch. Speaking as the Focus owner, I like my car just fine, and I don't think the car is the reason I don't get a visceral pleasure out of driving.

[ase.livejournal.com]

NYC as formative driving experience probably didn't help. But - seriously, good cars = good times! Someday I hope to own a good car, with a good engine and an excellent driving mix in the noisemaker so I can prove this fact to you empirically.

(Granted, the other reason I love driving is because the other options are 1,000 times worse - would you say that public transit was really a good idea to get to, say, the job you recently quit? and the grocery store afterward? And the party on Friday night? - but that V6 engine and engineering design that makes the car feel like it's got road traction and isn't a leaf on the wind elevate the experience from "not the red line" to something giddy-making. Or a V4 with, you know, actual pickup. hourglasscreate's Prius has more kick than a Focus.)

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

Someday I hope to own a good car, with a good engine and an excellent driving mix in the noisemaker so I can prove this fact to you empirically.

I'll hold you to that. *smirk*

would you say that public transit was really a good idea to get to, say, the job you recently quit? and the grocery store afterward? And the party on Friday night?

Granted--well, the job anyway. The grocery store you build around, and I try never to go to a party in a car, for security reasons. *grin* But your point is well taken, yeah.