My Vicarious New Car Buyer’s Experience: III: Enjoying Heather’s Car— Or, By the Time We Got to Woodstock…

My Vicarious New Car Buyer’s Experience: III: Enjoying Heather’s Car— Or, By the Time We Got to Woodstock…

On Saturday, Heather dropped the dime. Frustrated by game-playing by car dealers, anxious about getting in over her head, and experiencing hybrid anxiety every time she thought of going cheaper and getting a gas-powered car, she came to her decision and left with a 2014 Honda Accord Hybrid with a lustrous pearl white finish.

Hybrid Sign Crop

We’ve been getting 47 mpg on the highway and a little better than 50 mpg in town. This is a car that actually exceeds its advertised gas mileage!

The Accord is beautiful, has plenty of torque, and is more complicated than an F-15 Strike Eagle. It’s at least as much mobile computer as automobile. The owner’s manual is hundreds of pages long and it’ll be months before we figure everything out.

We’re getting used to the keyless entry and push-button start. We’re getting hooked on the right lane view and backup cameras. We’re enjoying playing music and audiobooks and making hands-free phone calls over Bluetooth. And best of all, we’re enjoying the high gas mileage.

2014-04-19, Heather's New 2014 Honda Accord Hybrid  003

Heather’s Accord on the lot at the Honda dealer, just before we drove it home.

We slept late on Sunday (because we were wiped out from a week of car shopping) and drove up the freeway to Woodstock, New York. Were there hippies there still, we wondered?

When we hit the town center, our questions were answered. Forty or more mostly older men sat in a circle, banging on drums.

2014-04-20, By the Tme We Got to Woodstock, It Was Two Thousand Fourteen  022

There were dancing groupies:

2014-04-20, By the Tme We Got to Woodstock, It Was Two Thousand Fourteen  017, Crop

There was even a bicycle dude.

Bicycle Dude

“Score!” Heather said.

Woodstock is a picturesque little village in the Catskills, about 100 miles from New York City. Today it looks like this:

Read More

My Relationship With Alcohol

My Relationship With Alcohol

Until now, ethanol has not played a significant role in my life. I understand and appreciate what a huge problem it is for many people and the problems it poses for society, but otherwise it has been barely on my radar.

My father would drink a beer now and again, but with one exception, I never saw him tipsy. When I was seven he had a few brews while out with his friends. When my mother picked him up  at the bowling alley and saw he’d had a few too many, she lit into him, and I couldn’t figure out why. My father seemed a happy man.

No one else in my family drank, or at least not much. A quart bottle of blackberry brandy sat in a cabinet in my parents’ kitchen for more than twenty years. The last time I saw it it was still half full.

Blue Moon Beer Label

Blue Moon, a Belgian white ale, is the only beer I’ve ever actually liked. My father drank the King of Beers—yes, Budweiser.

When I was in my late teens younger friends asked me to be their designed driver. Why? Because I wasn’t interested in imbibing. They would pick up a couple of six packs or a bottle of wine or cheap liquor and drink too much too fast, and I would obligingly stop the car so they could get out and puke. After the throwing up they were subdued and ready for me to take them home so they could go to bed. If that was what alcohol did, I didn’t see the point.

Read More