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

Re: As economy cars go...

[ase.livejournal.com]

That's one of the cars on my list. I'll be revising that right until I sign the paperwork; any car could get struck if I sit down in the driver's seat and have that moment of instant ergonomic/design revulsion. But I've heard pretty good things about not-'90s Mazdas, have inherited goodwill toward the Volkswagen Jetta (which would kill me in repair costs), and haven't heard much nice about anything American.

My limited experience with a Miata involved a lot of evenings losing passenger-side footspace to a six-pack and a friend's occasionally-repeated story about how a Miata couldn't accommodate her suitcase. How you fit that much stuff in passeth my comprehension!