View from the Mountain

A Real SUV

This is my second Acura MDX and with over 115,000 miles on it, it has seen plenty of challenges.  My first MDX helped clean out my mother's home in Mount Airy, North Carolina.  There seemed to always be some furniture riding up Interstate 81 with us to Roanoke, Virginia or even to Reston, Virginia where a couple of our children live.  When we moved from Roanoke in 2012,  the Acura made several trips to the coast fully loaded mostly with very heavy hand tools left over from our years on the farm.

In 2012 we sold our big Nissan truck.  We were driving it less than 3,500 miles a year and it hardly made sense to keep a vehicle we were driving so little. I decided to put a hitch for my boat on my MDX and make do with it.  The hauling chores for the Acura have gotten more and more interesting.  I keep a tarp in it almost all of the time.

Usually in spring and fall, there are at least a couple of trips for sod.  Then there are bags of mulch and dirt that we use in our gardening. Last year I took my tarp into the woods and raked pine straw on it and dragged it to the Acura, then hauled it home and dragged the tarp to the beds on the far side of yard where I spread the pine straw with a pitch fork.  It was very similar to feeding the loose hay that we sometimes had on our farm in Canada.

This year the pine straw was not so good in the woods so I bought bales of long leaf pine straw from the home improvement stores.  I made three trips nearly fully loaded with 10-15 bales each trip.  After that I ended up giving our palms a haircut and hauled the palm fronds away to the dump.

Our MDX also pulls my kayak up the slope and out of the water behind our home.  I have had a lot of vehicles over my life but I do not think I have every had one more versatile.  Usually it has a cooler or two bouncing around in it.

Certainly my Acura MDX is not a luxury vehicle dedicated to cruising to school and picking up groceries, but it is a faithful companion and has helped bring home its fair share of the sea's bounty.

Pricing models that irritate me

I am a pretty reasonable consumer.  I don't mind paying for quality services or goods, but I really hate "hidden charges" or charges cleverly disguised.

Last night we were having dinner at one of our favorite restaurants which will remain nameless.

We ordered our normal items and as we like to do these days asked if we could substitute steamed vegetables for french fries.  The waitress said no problem, and that was the beginning of the problem.

The main items we ordered were fine and our veggies were not quite as good as usual, but they were okay.  However, when we got our bill I noticed we had been charged an additional 99 cents each to switch from fries to vegetables.  We had ordered the same meals a dozen times in the last six months without being charged extra.

I questioned the waitress on the charge, and she said it was the new computer system which automatically added the charge.  She offered to have management come talk to be about it.  Since I know the owner, and knew he wasn't around, I said not to bother.  However, I wrote him a personal note about it this morning.

This irritates me almost as much as the restaurants that don't tell you how much their beverages are unless you ask and find out they are charging $2 for a glass of tea.

I have gotten irritated at some lawyers charging inflated prices for every fax that they do.  I recently sat through the presentation of a lawyer who is doing real estate closings for a flat fee.  It makes sense to me.  He will even come to our office so the customer is in more familiar circumstances.  I may give him a try.

Next on my irritation list are car dealerships with their surcharges on your service bill.  You would think with rates as high as they charge, that they could cover waste disposal some other way than tacking it on to your bill.

Then there is the whole mess of cable TV pricing and Internet access.  I thought someone was going to protect us from these highway robbers.  Our cable bills are ridiculous considering how little television we watch.

Yet the only solution seems to be bundled services.  The trouble is I want a high quality land line and good internet access.  They're both in different bundles where we live.

I am not willing to go with DSL or live all the time with Internet challenged telephones.

The idea that we can be sucked into some bad services with good pricing on one good service just isn't going to work for me.

It all reminds me of the Apple Computer model of business.  We will give you the best operating system around, but the only way you are going to get it is to buy our over priced hardware.

Perhaps that explains why I haven't bought a Mac in two years.

The weekend car wash

There are lot of things that don't happen often these days, and a few of them bring back a lot of memories.

When I was growing up there were a couple of things that got done on the weekend, and one was mowing the yard.  The other was washing the family car.

I know it is hard to believe, but until after I got my driver's license, our family only had one car.

It was that way because we didn't need another car and couldn't afford a second one anyway.  I was living with my mother then, and I can still see her out in the driveway washing the car.  There were plenty of times that I helped, but I was usually trapped behind the lawn mower.

After all the chores were done, we would often go out for dinner on Saturday night.

When my parents got back together we still went down to one car until I got my driver's license.

There weren't many Saturdays when I was home that I didn't wash my car.  I was fortunate as an only child and got some nice cars overs the years. 

There was a downside.  I got sent off to a Presbyterian military school in Tennessee for my high school years.  I didn't get to see my car very often until my senior year when I got to keep it at school, but not drive it unless I had to rush home to see my dad who was in and out of the hospital that year.

Still I enjoy washing a car, it is a job which can be very rewarding.  I also admit finding the mowing that I do pleasurable so I may be a little weird, but maybe that is what happens when your formative years were the fifties and sixties.

I especially like mowing our yard down near North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks.  It's flat and has few bushes to mess up your long straight runs. It helps to have a great lawn mower.

Washing my car is a different thing down on the coast.  We're right on the water and though our driveway water is filtered before it hits the water behind the house, I would just as soon use a place farther from the water so I usually stop at a car wash where I can use one of those power wands.

It is not as much fun as doing it in your own driveway and being able to admire your handwork, but I'll still get to that once in a while when we visit Roanoke.

I guess that is just one of the trade offs for living on the  coast.

Technology that I'm not certain I need

I sometimes wonder about our mindless rush towards new technology.

We bought a new Toyota Avalon a couple of years ago.  It was one of the earlier cars to feature no keys.

I can see some benefits in having no keys.  The door doesn't get scratched.  I don't have to fumble for key, and no one can run off with my key and easily have a copy made.

I have been driving cars for over 42 years.  Scratches on the door from keys have never been a big problem for me.  I have managed quite well getting in my cars, especially with automatic doors that unlock when I press a button on the key fob.  No one has ever copied one of my keys except me, and that has turned out to be pretty handy when three people needed to use the same car.

So none of those are good reasons that I need keyless starting of my car.

We have found the batteries in the keyless entry/start fobs lose their power quickly.  You have to go back to the dealer to have them replaced.  One of our lasted less than two years, the other slightly over two years.  The dealer says the average is about a year.

I guess the odds of both batteries dying at the same time are slim, but ours went out just a month a part.  While there is a key hidden in the fob that will open the doors, it doesn't do you much good if you also want to start the car.

It just might be that we have some great technology whose most visible effect is that it is just one more reason we have to go back to the dealer.

These days there is no way a shade tree mechanic could do much more than drain the oil from the engines of these cars.  It would probably take an engineering degree to change the spark plugs.

Now I have to have an electronic key to get the motor to run.  The key and switch were some of the most reliable technology on cars.

The companies have decided it is time to move on, I guess that is way "progress" happens these days, we need new technology just so we can have something new to sell.

Cars- A great movie

Americans have always had a special relationship with their cars.  The movie, "Cars," lets us take it to the next level.  We actually get to become cars and live in their special motorized world.

There's always been an element of freedom that has been tied to our passion for cars.  A car was a ticket to another life if you needed one.  You could always get in your car and just head to California or Canada.  Just pick the destination, a car could set you free.

I can highly recommend "Cars."  It is the best movie that I've seen in a while. 

"Cars" shows  what could always be possible with a little help from your car.  For a couple of hours the Cars movie lets you imagine the impossible. 

It also got me thinking about my first trip to a new world by way of a new car.

It was a 1969 XKE  which cost $6,900.  At the time the money was slightly more than room & board plus tuition for a year at Harvard.  I suspect it is well over $50,000 for a year at Harvard now.  Jags probably cost even more.

From the moment I sat in the driver's seat of the XKE there was no question that I was going to figure out how to buy it.  It was something that could only happen once in a lifetime. The smell of real leather and the feel of polished wood was foreign to someone who had only driven American cars.  The unbelievable smooth acceleration of the car was a wonder to behold.

I traded in one of the great muscle cars of all time for the silver XKE coupe.  It was a Blue GTO convertible with a white interior and a racing cam, a functional hood scoop, and three two barrel carburetors. It was nearly identical to the one to the left which I captured in a Chapel Hill parking lot in the summer of 2004.

My GTO came loping into any place it visited, sounding like an controlled explosion waiting to happen.  It would bury you deep into the bucket seats.  As a crazy teenager I once pegged the speedometer on a deserted stretch of newly opened interstate highway.  It would burn rubber in any gear but fourth. I still have the wooden gear knob from the chrome Hurst shifter.  I'll never forget the rumble of that GTO as it came into our driveway in Mount Airy, it was an American classic.  One of my Harvard classmates once asked me to drag race him, I uttered one of my best lines ever, "So how many gears do you want me to spot you?"

The Jag was a completely different beast.  The GTO was brute force, and the Jag had an engine that seemed to rev forever without ever seeming strained.  It would go around any curve twenty miles an hour faster than the GTO and do it effortlessly.  It probably would have been beaten by the GTO in the quarter mile, but by 3/8 of a mile the GTO would have been watching the Jag's tail lights.

There will never be a thrill as great as popping the hood of the Jag and having the whole engine and front end exposed along with those three beautiful Weber carburetors.  It even had wire spoke wheels with knock off hubs.

Yet the XKE was one of the most unreliable cars that I ever owned.  The unreliability must have come from the British who have never accepted electricity.  On the Jag's maiden voyage home from Boston where I bought it just before Christmas one year, one windshield wiper wouldn't work.  I had to stick my arm out the window to clean snow off the windscreen all the way to Pennsylvania Turnpike.  Once when I took it camping on Ocracoke, the air conditioning quit.

The Jag had to have regular tune-ups at 2,000 miles and the only dealer was in Greensboro, NC, but the guy was a magician, the car would literally fly after the tune-ups.  I would probably still have it, had I not gotten really stupid and wanted to have it at college my senior year when I was living with 300 young ladies in a dorm at Radcliffe.  One morning I woke up and someone had stolen it.  There was only a pile of glass where my silver Jag had been parked. My other vehicle at the time was a Dodge Powerwagon with a PTO winch on the front that would pull it up a mountainside.

I used the insurance money from the Jag to buy a Land Rover that would barely do 65 mph on the New Jersey Turnpike with a tractor-trailer breathing down its exhaust pipe.  In the winter you had to wear a down jacket on trips since the skin was aluminum and designed not to rust.  Of course being another car of British heritage, there was no thought to keeping passengers warm. Obviously smart Englishmen spent their time wandering around in a desert where it was warm instead of the frozen North.  The Land Rover confirmed my belief that the British have no clue about building reliable vehicles except maybe for hot climates.  Whenever I forded a stream which I did often in Canada, I had to stop take the distributor cap off and dry it out before continuing.  The engine and transmission were one unit which is fine except when the transmission needed work.

My next vehicle after the Land Rover retired was one of the original Toyota Landcruisers with a 8,000 lbs Warn winch on the front.    What can I say. I lived on a cattle ranch in the wilderness.  The vehicles were what I needed in that world.

In these days of $3 per gallon gasoline, the GTO would be expensive to run. When I drove it around the country, it got about 8 miles per gallon which wasn't much different than than the mileage I saw on the trip to Alaska that I took with the Dodge Powerwagon.  It was an old style heavy duty 3/4 ton truck that rode nothing like my the silky smooth 2004 Nissan Titan truck that I used to have which got 15 miles to the gallon.

As an update from 2014, my current favorite  vehicle is my 2005 Acura MDX which now has 110,000 miles.  It is my second MDX and it is a great vehicle.  It got me up and down the hill in Roanoke at times when almost nothing would move.  Of course given my choice and nice weather I would rather be in either my boat or kayak, both of which are in the backyard by the water. If nothing else you have to love the Acura for its front license plate.

At least "Cars," the movie, gave me a great ride down memory lane,  I just wish it hadn't gotten into stereotyping farm tractors as stupid. :)

If you have ever just driven off a snow covered road in your fancy car, that big farm tractor with ring chains on the rear wheels is a very welcome sight.  In the very white world of Canada where tow trucks are often as scarce as bare roads, farm tractors are kings.

Some of my best rides have been John Deere tractors. I loved my 3130 and and the 2120, my first tractor. Both were great green beasts.