It was somewhere on the outskirts of Manteca where it set in: I really like this car.
Not just because the mileage is better than anything I’ve ever driven up to and including my Saturn SC2, which could eke out over 35 mpg if you filled it with premium and drove it on fresh asphalt at freeway speed. Not just because of the sensor array that provides extra warning of blind-spot cars or crossing pedestrians behind or imminent curbs in front. Not just because it’s the third straight car to carry the plates affirming my loyalty to my squad, though that still means a lot.
No, the reason it clicked for good was because I was out behind the wheel on a bright sunny day in rural California, orchards of almonds to either side of a two-lane road, blue sky shining through a panoramic glass roof, the wife and I luxuriating in black leather bucket seats with plenty of legroom, steering a big yet agile yet comfortable Chevy through the parts of California most people don’t think about while swing music from the 1940s played through the sat-radio.
It does me no end of good to get the hell out of Silly Con Valley, for reasons I have elucidated before and doubtless will again (probably in the very next post). The last ride for Harvey was to Santa Barbara and back on 101; that drive is one of my favorite things to do because most of the world knows Hollywood, San Francisco, “L.A.” and “Silicon Valley” and there is SO much else in the nation’s most populous state and the world’s sixth largest economy. This is where your food comes from. This is where a lot of your lumber probably comes from. There are towns here that you drive through of a Friday evening and think – the African-American people are Latino instead and the churches are Catholic rather than Baptist, and the sporting obsession is probably the Giants instead of the Crimson Tide, but in almost any other respect, you could be back in Alabama, in any town of 8000 or so. It’s not a long leap from Fultondale to Gonzales.
Five years ago, my wife had the presence of mind to rent a Dodge Charger for our trip to Louisiana and Alabama. I drove this big growling car through the byways of the South, from New Orleans to Mobile then up to Birmingham and back to Canal Street, and something about it just felt right. Big comfortable domestic car, away from town, seeing the countryside. I didn’t realize how much that hearkened back to the days of riding around in my Monte Carlo with a sackful of Milo’s, listening to Alabama football games. There’s something akin to that in the haul down 101, getting around traffic by taking the Monterrey Road instead until you get closer to Gilroy, and then winding down the same route as historic El Camino Real with the sun setting. Distant sight of fields of produce, or dusty warehouses, or the silhouette of an oil well, or a train passing in the night.
Get out. Get away. Go further than the Caltrain or the VTA can take you, away from the bubble, away from the echo chamber, and see the rest of the world. That’s what this car can do for me now. And at 40+ miles per gallon, we can actually do it in a way that just wasn’t possible at 25mpg. And I can see the whole of California, not just the Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Of which more presently.