Seriously, I haven’t been out driving for a couple months now. Yes, I’ve driven from home to whatever destination I need to go to, but I haven’t been DRIVING. The crappy part about the limited income that I have right now is that I can’t really afford to put gas into the Thunderbird. Not in the quantities that I would need to go out and do some frivolous drive for the sake of driving type driving.
See, what I normally do when I’m bored is hop into my car and go for a rip. It might be for half an hour, it might be for three hours. I just love driving. I drove to Bowden once. There is nothing in Bowden. I pretty much just drove there, put some air in the tires, bought a drink, and turned around and went home.
Some people find driving boring. They must live in the prairies because even in Alberta, there are some good driving roads. Admittedly driving to Bowden wasn’t one of them. But the closer that you get to the mountains, the better the roads get. I’m not talking about the conditions of the roads of course, some of those roads are brutal, but the interaction that you have with the road.
A good road is a road that if you stop paying attention to it, stop respecting it, it will bite you in the ass. Of course, driving on a straight stretch through Saskatchewan will bite you in the ass if you stop paying attention to it as well, but that will take longer to happen than in Western Alberta or BC. Unfortunately I can’t comment on the Eastern side of Canada because I’ve never driven out there. A good example of a road that requires you pay attention to it is highway 97A just south of Sicamous BC. A good portion of that road, for those of you that don’t know, is right beside the lake with a cliff rising above you on the other side. I know that cliff used to drop rocks every once in a while, and I doubt that it’s stopped since. So you have a road that has a bunch of S curves, with water to one side and a rock wall that may or may not drop something on your head to the other… yeah. You respect that road. Oh, and blind corners too. Good times.
Writing that paragraph made me want to drive to Kelowna now.
The biggest problem for me is the Thunderbird. It’s just such a gas hog. I mean yeah, OK, it has more horsepower than the 944, so you would think that it would get better gas mileage, but it doesn’t. At around 115 horsepower per ton, versus the 944’s 119, and the astounding German engineering that went into the 944, the Thunderbird sucks back the gas like an alcoholic at a wine tasting. To put in more standard terms, the 944 gets 10 L/100km in the city, and I would guess around 6 L/100km on the highway (that doesn’t match the EPA ratings, but are my own calculations), and the Thunderbird gets 17 L/100km city, 10 L/100km highway. That’s a huge difference, especially driving around the city.
Really, what all this boils down to is I need to fix my God damn Porsche.
Meh.
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