Evening Cruise

[rick]

So last night I dragged my almost comatose body away from the TV after watching the women's US Open tennis final then the second game of the Toronto Blue Jays doubleheader plus the first half of my Ottawa Redblacks dismal showing against Vancouver (Canadian Football League)....... and went out to the garage (11 pm) to fire up my Lincoln. September 11th is a day none of us will forget (we Canadians included). The car hadn't been run for a week but at least it had been washed the last time I'd used it. I don't know about your 430 Mel engines but after sitting for a week mine likes twenty-one pumps on the gas pedal then one failed crank plus five more pumps at which point it happily fires up. I usually move it out of the garage cold because that dual exhaust fills up the garage so quickly. I let it sit there for about three minutes and in this weather the automatic choke can usually be kicked off.......... so after all that, I drove over to the Tim Hortons coffee shop and picked up a coffee to go (paid for the guy in the line-up behind me) and the took off to cruise around my town of ten-thousand people for a while before heading out the highway on a fifteen-mile loop that included driving through two other small towns and one hamlet. I know there's talk about the old school brakes and the lights on these cars but I'm happy with both and I like driving at night. My high beams work fine for me. Not much traffic and I probably rarely got over fifty miles an hour last night (btw at sixty indicated miles an hour on my speedometer I'm actually moving at an honest fifty-six). Arrived back home and for once after an extended drive I managed to back the car into the garage with no issues (sometimes she doesn't like shifting into reverse and we all know why). Great way to get ready for bed if you ask me!

[TonyC]

That extra reading of the speed gauge sounds about par for that design of speedo, according to the review articles written back in the day. Mine has been a bit dubious sometimes since moving to Kansas, but I suspect a big part of that being very poor calibration of the display radars on Fort Riley (such radars are virtually nonexistent outside the fort). In the past, and even recently when passing through other locales that do sport their own display radars, my gauge read dead-on-balls accurate, maybe on sporadic occasions reading lower than sensed speed. One day, hopefully soon, like this year, I can be in a position to do a recheck.

So funny, cruises like Rick's were always so routine to me, not even worth using up precious bytes. Of course, my car was never just a part-time show novelty; he was my only source of conveyance, so trips like that were almost daily, except when I was away on Army business. Now, after six months and counting without my car or even being behind a steering wheel, I'm afraid of forgetting even how to drive; this has been the longest period without driving in my life since I first got licensed for it. I don't doubt that I'll have the temptation to post every little local drive for weeks after Frankenstein is revived (that is, if he is...and I still have enough leftover stubbornness to change that if into a when; a failed engine is not enough to break me).

---Tony