After the last snow storm my black brick was speckled with so much salt it had turned white. I’m hoping this snow bank will protect from all the splatter on this high-traffic road. A fresh coat of wax makes the snow just slip off.
Rusted & Busted Travels & Tribulations
We drove down to Northern VA this weekend to visit my parents and had a chance to check out some museums in DC. Pulling onto the mall at 10:15 on a Sunday allowed us to park right in front of the Capitol, the National Gallery and the museum of the American Indian. It also gave me a great backdrop to photograph the brick with it’s new lowering springs.
The 4.5 hour ride down was quite pleasant. I’d been nervous about the stiffness of the springs but overall everything is fine. On long stretches of highway it felt about the same. The only problem is large dips and rises. The car doesn’t absorb them like it used to; you ride the full height and depth. Luckily there’s no bottoming out or shock crash-through, and no scrapping the exhaust on speed bumps.
I’ve been driving my wife crazy taking turns though. It’s so easy and precise to steer that you can lose a sense of your speed. Of course I was pushing the car a little, sending our case of Trader Joe’s Two Buck Chuck sliding around the trunk, and forcing Desiree to grab onto her seat. Fun!
But, as always, I’ve got a new gremlin in the car. No overdrive. It kicked out last week, so the whole drive was spent at 60mph in the right lane at 3200rpm. I gotta figure out if I want to check the OD solenoid, or just get the ipd bypass kit.
In honor of Jalopnik.com “Crash Week” I present an image I took last week of an accident I witnessed in Hoboken. This is the second time in the past few months that I’ve watched cars turning left into traffic and getting smashed.
We got back yesterday from a long trip to California. It was nice driving around in a new rental car. We drove up to the Giant Forest in Sequoia National Park in our Hertz Mustang convertible. Having the top down was amazing, as the roads wound wind around the mountain, with beautiful views and giant, 3000 year old trees towering overhead. The Ford had a V6, which wasn’t too bad, considering the roads were so twisty that you couldn’t really open up the throttle anyway. But it was low and firm, which was great for the tight turns and switchbacks.
The brick reached an important milestone last week: it hit 149,999 miles. Really cool seeing all those nines. I’m looking forward to 199,999.
I learned the hard way not to rely on the car’s jack to hold the brick up in the air. I needed to tighten the right rear shock and figured it wouldn’t be a problem to just leave it on the jack since I wasn’t going under the car. The combination of no parking brake, no wheel wedge, and banging on the wrench sent the car teetering forward, bending the jack and gently settling down on the brake rotor. Great.
I grabbed a couple of stands and slowly jacked the car up, notch by notch. Lesson learned.
Just got back from Englishtown, NJ and Raceway Park’s “Summer Motorsports Spectacular”. Lots of loud and wicked-fast jet cars, monster trucks and the 1000 hp Cool Bus wheel stander pictured above.
I put together a compilation video with Grave Digger, Maximum Destruction, Bull Dozer, Cool Bus and the Jet Semi. Tom Meents, the driver of Max Destruction, is nuts. He went faster, jumped farther, and spun crazier than anyone else out there.
The highlight of the night, though, was Jill Canuso’s jet car Queen of Diamonds. She ran the fastest 1/4 mile I’ve ever seen in person: 5.4 seconds at 301 mph. I told my daughters, “Hey, that was a lady driving that car!” and they did a double take.
I got yet another parking ticket in Hoboken. I parked in front of the house and thought I’d hear the street cleaner drive by in time to move. Unfortunately, the ticket writer pumped out the violation quicker than I could leap down 2 flights of stairs and run across the street. It didn’t even matter if I moved the car. For $45 they can drive the Zamboni around my Brick.
Pic from the latest Simpsons, where Lisa is overwhelmed by the disasters our future has in store for us. I’ve always felt that we could never run out of parking; someone is always leaving a spot, right?
I got another parking ticket from the city of Hoboken this week. It’s a bi-monthly occurance for me, as I forget the street cleaning rules every so often and wind up covering a dirty patch of asphalt on an otherwise sparkling road.
Street parking is a huge issue in Hoboken, NJ, as it is in many cities around the world. When people live in homes that are stacked atop each other there just isn’t enough square feet of street to accommodate their steel and rubber vehicles. Garages spots here go for almost $300… if you can find them. Waiting lists are years long and if you get into the notorious Robotic Parking garage you may never get your car back or it may be signifigantly damaged.
From the NY Times:
The motive is unclear. The weapon is a mystery. But what is certain is that what is being called the country’s first fully automated parking garage has already claimed two victims, most recently on Oct. 16, when the $12 million garage sent a Jeep Wrangler plummeting four stories to its demise… In February 2004, a Cadillac DeVille fell and crashed in the same garage here at 916 Garden Street.
Some people in the city take liberties with the no parking zones near intersections, but this makes the crosswalks incredibly dangerous, as you have to walk into the road and can barely see oncoming traffic. Pushing your kids across the street in a stroller becomes next to impossible when a hulking SUV blocks your vision. The Hoboken Parking Authority was recently called out on NPRs “This American Life” for inconsistent parking enforcement. Host Ira Glass interviews “Kathy”, a vigilante parking enforcer who confronts a city employee who parks in a crosswalk. I wonder if it was the employee who wrote my ticket.
As often happens when I’m driving with the kids, one of them started getting carsick. When someone in the back seat is gagging and spraying all over my luxurious vinyl interior it’s pretty tough to concentrate on driving. I pulled over to the side of the road.
Claire was fine, but it got me thinking about something I’d read in the book “Traffic” and on the author Tom Vanderbilt’s blog, How We Drive. He writes about the dangers of driving while talking on the cell phone and I had a hard time understanding the difference between talking on the phone and talking to a passenger. Dialing the phone could also be compared to fiddling with the radio or GPS. Why do cell phones pose a distinct hazard that those other activities don’t?
An article in the Washington Post cites research:
A 1997 study in the New England Journal of Medicine and a
report by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in 2005 found
drivers who use cell phones while driving were four times more likely
to be in a crash.Hands-free devices may also cause a hazard, Froetscher added. A
study by researchers at the University of Utah found no difference in
driver concentration between using hand-held or hands-free devices. In
fact, talking to a passenger while driving is much safer than talking
on a cell phone, the Utah researchers noted.
I assume the reason is a matter of context. The passenger riding shotgun is experiencing traffic along with you. This means they see and hear what you hear, and adjust their conversation accordingly. They may even notice and point out things you haven’t. If it’s your mom, she may even slam hard on the passenger brake, signaling her dissatisfaction with your hoonage.
The National Safety Council backs this up:
“When you’re on a call, even if both hands are on the wheel, your head is in the call, and not on your driving,”
Froetscher said. “Unlike the passenger sitting next to you, the person on the other end of the call is oblivious to
your driving conditions. The passenger provides another pair of eyes on the road.”
My puking kids don’t have that ability, however. I’ll have to continue to resort to pulling over and grabbing a towel and spare pants from the trunk.
