Drive
Two weeks ago I sold my Astro van. The cost of repairs was too steep, especially when I took into account the crappy MPG: it gets about 15 mpg in town, and maybe 18 on the highway. Still, I was sad to see it go: the van had tons of space, and could easily haul my instruments, camping supplies, son, and girlfriend to the festivals. The Astro is the only minivan built on a truck chassis, and was great for hauling amplifiers.
As I was trying to sell the Astro, I began poking around for a used station wagon, and found what I needed a couple of blocks from work. Last Tuesday, I bought a 1996 Subaru Legacy wagon, and by Wednesday evening it was inspected and ready to go. I took the car on its maiden voyage this weekend, traveling to Wind Gap, PA for a bluegrass festival, and then bringing Sam back to his mom.
If I didn’t mention it in a previous post, the Glorious Global War on Terror has, unhappily, resulted in a passport requirement for Canadians entering the country. This has predictably led to a major backlog, and Sam’s mom is still waiting for hers to arrive, so I had to cross the border to pick up and deliver the boy. I’m not talking about traveling to Montreal, which would be hellish: I follow I-81 through New York State, crossing into Ontario via the 1,000 Islands region. The trip from Wind Gap to the drop-off point is about 4 hours: to travel from the drop-off to Philadelphia takes about 6 hours. Since the festival was still going on on Sunday, I left late and dropped Sam off around 4:00 PM.
This estimate doesn’t take into account the effects of eye strain, and so around 6:30 I parked at a rest area in New York and slept for about an hour. This estimate also doesn’t take into account the truly hideous construction project taking place on I-476 between Lansdale and the Mid-County tolls, which happens to be my exit. It’s a nine-mile stretch of roadway with no alternate routes, and for over an hour traffic jerked along at less than 5 miles an hour. That is, when the roadway wasn’t a giant parking lot, which was most of the time.
All of this is to say that, even when you’re driving around in a zippy little Subaru, when there’s no radio (even when there IS a radio) a long drive is a real bitch.
2 Responses to “Drive”
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June 18th, 2008 at 5:12 am
Eye strain. That shit is crazy. I ended up taking the final seven hours behind the wheel from South Bend (yeah, we decided to just charge ahead and do it all in one night). I took over at a rest stop near Buffalo. We had a good stash of tunes, fortunately (I’ll be posting the full list along with roadkill counts, license plate tallies, and other anecdotes of the trip on the myspace blog this week), as well as some choice three-hour Best Show on WFMU podcasts. Becky and I got snippy and short with each other at times, but overall, it was smooth. But the eye strain. Holy crap. Becky got it first. “I think I’m hallucinating,” she said at some point before we’d passed the Albany routes. “Are those lights changing?” I didn’t admit, at least then, that, yeah, the fog trails in the headlights and distant overhead light pollution were, in fact, changing colors. Green. Then some red. Then white. Etc. Before our last pit stop somewhere in western Massachusetts, I couldn’t tell if we were going uphill or downhill or straight. “Have we been driving downhill for the last half hour?” Beck - “No, we’re going uphill.” It all had started taking on the feeling of a roller coaster. A roller coaster with eighteen wheelers next to us. Sunrise and the attendant nightmare birdies helped smooth out the visual confusion, but man, it got fucking scary for awhile. At one point we saw a white sheet draped over what appeared to be the body of an animal in the breakdown lane, which made for some good punchy hysterical “what-if” jokes. Anyhoo, we got home at 5:15 a.m., drank a couple of beers, and slept badly into the afternoon. I’m still off kilter.
June 18th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
I was going to say, it sounds like you were in need of a couple of frosty alcoholic beverages, but it looks like Tim beat me to it. I’m glad you ditched the van. It didn’t sound safe to drive anymore, even if you did repairs.