East coast adventures
I’m currently in my home area of Lancaster, Penna., for today visiting family and having some meetings and going to New York City tomorrow for more meetings and a Saturday in the Big City.
The adventurous part of the story is this: my car’s (a ’98 Honda CRV, I’ve driven it about 80,000 miles now with no major problems) has been acting up recently and Tues completely pooped out. The mechanic thinks it’s the distributor, but doesn’t really know. Anyways, so I was without a car, and thru some fluke of nature, every car rental agency between Goshen and South Bend was out of cars.
So, Dave/David, a friend/consultant of mine, just happened to have a 1984 diesel VW Rabbit sitting around that needed to be driven. No a/c, no radio, no anything except 50 mpg fuel economy and the heat on full blast all the time. I drove it the 600 miles to Lancaster yesterday evening (using about 12 gallons of gas) and will drive it up to my cousin’s in Brooklyn tomorrow. It’s a great little car — once it gets going, it’s quite zippy. Err…not zippy, but umphy.
And I took a RedPost/Kit along for the ride. A quiet, thoughtful, travel buddy, not very talkative but quite a good listener.
So my question, why does a 1984 vehicle get better gas mileage than almost all new cars today, counting some of the hybrids? The market hasn’t demanded it for awhile, but now that the demand is there with $3 gas, probably rising to $5 shortly, hopefully we can get back to where we were 24 years ago.
Oh, and on a side note, I got an I-Pass last week, the Illinois version of E-ZPass. There’s a new I-Zoom coming to Indiana, but Illinois doesn’t charge a $1/month fee like I-Zoom and E-ZPass. Anyways, I stopped at a rest stop on the way thru Ohio, added the VW Rabbit to my I-Pass account, and proceeded to use my I-Pass through the PA Turnpike’s E-ZPass at 55 mph. I think it took the states awhile to agree on a standard, but I’m glad they did and I can use my I-Pass from Illinois, soon in Indiana, thru Pennsylvania (Ohio doesn’t have any electronic tolling), New Jersey, and to New York City. There are far too many pass/zoom/ez/i/whatevers in this paragraph.
