Non-fill post

I've purchased a rack for the car. Rather than getting the Volkswagen rack I got a Yakima rack, the idea being that I don't want to have to buy a whole new roof rack rig when the car gets replaced. It fits and seems pretty sturdily attached when attached, and now that it's assembled it goes on and off pretty easily.

No word yet on how badly compromised the aerodynamics will be at highway speeds. With a blizzard coming on Friday we'll have to test it out with a roof full of skis on Sunday.

Non-fill post

The car’s warranty has expired, but it has not yet burst into flames. I have managed to drive it past 37,000 miles without serious trouble, although thanks to a roofing nail I did need to replace one of its fancy low profile tires; and the windshield wipers only lasted about 35,000 miles before disintegrating. Otherwise things are good. Even the interior is pretty clean. I could have enjoyed one more winter of warranty coverage had we not driven it to Maine for a week last summer, but then I’d have been driving the fucking minivan all those miles, which would have worked out well for no one. I need to get a proper roof rack.

The best thing that has happened to the car so far is that after Volkswagen mailed me bright yellow DIESEL FUEL ONLY stickers with which to festoon the inside of the fuel door the guys at the dealer mounted a bunch of these stickers themselves during the 30,000 mile maintenance visit. No longer needing them for the car, I repurposed them: my ceramic coffee mug at work now sports a completely waterproof DIESEL FUEL ONLY sticker. The sticker is coffee-proof, too. I suspect that not even diesel fuel could easily remove it, but I don’t brew my coffee that strong.

I plan to stop going to the dealer’s service department after the 40,000 mile service because, as much as I like this car, everybody in the Volkswagen building gives me the creeps. Hopefully my instincts will prove to have been irrational.

 

5,493 miles (14.21 gallons @ $3.099)

So the car has seen its first serious traffic jam. Two or three minutes after leaving work I failed to notice cars stopped dead, two wide, until about twenty feet too late to do anything about it, so I sat in first gear, periodically riding the clutch forward several dozen inches at a time for close to thirty minutes.  (I timed it using the trip computer, which mocked my stillness. I got about 8 miles per gallon, which mocked my decision to get this fancy TDI instead of a Prius.) It wasn't too bad, because what can you do?; I must be getting old.

I will say that traffic in general is way worse now that summer has ended, and the number of non-commuting, out-of-town trips on this tank of gas was probably one. So now we're back to commuting at the height of rush hour, thankful that the company's new office is about a million times easier to get to and from than the previous.

A-and I washed the car for the first time during kid soccer on Saturday morning. It came out looking dirtier than when it went in. The car wash did such a horrible job, in fact, that I spent an hour or so today driving to the hardware store, kids in tow, to get some actual car soap and a wash mitt, and then washed the damn thing in the driveway with the hose. The kids loved spraying it with the hose until they got too cold. The lovely wife sent word via one of them that the other car should also get washed. Then I had a beer and mostly didn't watch football. Good times.

4,943 miles (9.3 gallons @ $2.899)

So the Hess station just off the highway really kind of sucks anyway; not just because it only has one diesel pump—that’s predictably taken either by a non-diesel car or by a large truck, and that has no card swiper on it thereby requiring two separate trips all the way into the store in order to buy fuel from it—but also because it is pretty much impossible to get in and out of at rush hour. I pulled in because I was running early and had noticed that the fuel was slightly cheaper than usual, and after filling my two-thirds empty tank I hopped in and pulled out. So far, so (surprisingly) good. Then a van pulled in just in front of me and stopped, blocking the entrance; and a guy very, slowly, got, out, of, the side door, clearly being dropped off (for work? nearby?), and then the van very, slowly, drove into a position that somehow not only blocked the other cars waiting to get out of the Hess lot, but also blocked the van from moving forward; and clearly this van wasn’t about to move backward quickly, nor predictably, so I waited a minute. After about a minute and a half the driver of the parked car that had been blocking the van from driving further forward returned from within the store and pulled out, thereby freeing the van to creep, forward, a little—and just like that, I was free. My zen-like patience and the beautiful weather had saved the day once again and I soon arrived at work, mysteriously not the slightest bit frustrated.

The weather has been so beautiful that I’ve taken to rolling down all the windows and opening the sunroof whenever I go anywhere, which has the added benefit of preventing me from leaving anything in the car lest it blow out. It’s so clean, in fact, that I drove four of us to lunch today. Brazilian takeout. Only one of us spoke conversational Brazilian Portuguese, but his was the order that nearly got messed up. Alas. Then we drove back to the office and ate waaaay too much meat. Good times.

I took the car in for its three-month courtesy check this afternoon. Despite it having been driven about five thousand miles they (and the owner’s manual) insist that the oil is only halfway to needing to be changed. I waited fifteen minutes—coding and listening to the dealers in hushed tones telling one another party and woman stories— they inflated my tires and inspected the car well enough to print a document saying they had done so; not a negative word to report.

The stink described earlier this summer has dissipated. Hopefully it won’t return when closed-window driving season returns this winter.

4,561 miles (14.13 gallons @ $2.949)

[September  5] On the summer’s last trip down to vacationland I had both kids in the back, both behaving reasonably well and drinking juice boxes without making a complete hash of the leather seats—although the seats are black, so what the hell?—and saying funny things and requesting good music (Billy Bragg and Wilco, Apples In Stereo, and They Might Be Giants, I believe it was), and in order to avoid what looked like a catastrophic backup of some kind we had left the main highway for the state road that wound through three or four coastal towns. This meant short, gently rolling hills at speeds between 35 and 60 miles an hour with plenty of gear shifting and engine braking, and without having the engine wound out too much. And it turns out that this is exactly how Volkswagens are meant to be driven. The car and I couldn’t have been happier except if the kids had been willing to drive with the windows down; we had to settle for having the sunroof and rear windows cracked.

At any rate, it got to be time to fill the tank, whereupon I noticed that the car had been averaging (!) something like 52 miles a gallon since leaving home. This with basically no attention paid to fuel efficiency on the whole trip save for having squealed the tires in second gear getting onto the highway just as we had left—the driver in front of me stopped, god damn it, in order to merge into full-speed Interstate highway traffic—and even so we had done absurdly well. I got a few drops of diesel fuel on my fingers and the solventy smell lasted at least an hour. What a nice little car.

Annoying fact: bugs are beginning to collect in the windscreen mesh in front of the sunroof, which won’t be fun to clean.

3,951 miles (14.3 gallons @ $3.039)

So there actually is a little chime that goes off when the fuel tank gets pretty close to empty.  I had been bemusedly watching the trip odometer tell me that I'd gone over six hundred miles on a tank of gas—I swear I was actually watching the road at the same time—when the chime and the gas tank warning light lighting up interrupted the Robin Williams standup routine about the invention of golf.  I was laughing not quite hard enough to completely lose control of the car, but pretty close, and the chime kind of brought be back to the reality that I was piloting several thousand pounds of metal and my nephew really rather quickly down a road, and so in a sense my tendency to burn the whole tank down to fumes before refilling it was fortuitous, and the chime-accompanied illumination of the idiot light rather well timed.

I did, of course, still have several dozen miles remaining according to the Range indicator on the trip computer, so I stretched it out until this morning; dropped the kids off at camp; and got myself to a pump. 10 miles left, it claimed, not terribly loudly. The concrete around the pump was totally covered in spilled diesel fuel, and the smell seeped into my flip flops to the point that I was a little concerned the rest of the day about tracking diesel wherever I walked. No obvious stains so far.

The kids are starting to complain about how the car smells, which is baffling since there's basically nothing in it.  Maybe a mouse has died inside or something.  It's almost cool enough that I can just air the car out for a few months (while driving) and maybe that will take care of things.  Not a terrible smell, but it's neither a new car smell nor nothing; nor in between. Olfactory research will continue, and I'll keep the space apprised.

 

3,308 miles (12.87 gallons @ $3.099)

So this car easily gets mileage in the high 40's, if only you can manage to drive conservatively and keep your speed between 60 and 70 miles per hour. Around here this is essentially impossible to do, but I was driving back from vacationland the other night and decided that it was probably safer than trying to maintain my already too-high speed.  That, and I was too hepped up from listening to the Red Sox lose to the Yankees, which is marginally tolerable during the regular season when Don Orsillo and Jerry Remy nurse us through the experience but which I cannot stand while having to simultaneously listen to the clown on Fox Sports—is it McCarver? It has to be McCarver—the one who constantly talks, sentence fragments tumbling after one another in a uniform drip, the intonation always the same, like a post-op Dora the Explorer, horrible bits of half-information that Don and Jerry already told us earlier in the season, other futile and inane attempts not to fumble the riffs handed him by his color men or by the managers as he interviews them, all the while getting way too excited when someone gets a hit—a hit! a hit!—or steals second!—so I got in the car and drove home. I tried listening to the game on the radio but my disposition toward it was already fouled, so I turned it off and listened to the car while I drove it hyperefficiently. It sounds nice, and there are no rattles. Averaged 48 on the way home.

The car is a Volkswagen, which means that I've been expecting The Smell to kick in at any moment. In the dim recesses of my mind is a snippet of an old Car Talk episode wherein the boys describe The Volkswagen Problem, which is that they eventually begin to smell for some probably condensation-related reason. Mine has seen a lot of humidity this summer, and has had the air conditioning running a lot, and now that the overpowering new leather smell has begun to fade ever so slightly there's something different about the aroma compared with the other car. I desperately hope that this is not The Smell. I shall keep this space apprised.

2,763 miles (12.62 gallons @ $3.059)

[August 1] So it turns out that the state of New York is absolutely huge. I know this from looking at maps, and I remember it from having driven much of its breadth once or twice, and from driving across Pennsylvania more than once, but it's easy to forget. I had not quite grasped previously how rural most of it is.

US 20 is a country highway of the sort that I imagine someone like E. B. White dragging his family across on a weekend car trip to go check something out—Niagara Falls!  The world's largest sock! A cave!—children fussing in the back whether we're there yet, having to pee, so much corn, she's on my side of the seat, license plate bingo.  It started as two lanes: Main Street for three or four towns in a row with a stoplight at the center of each, before broadening into a four-lane proto-highway complete with a soft shoulder and guardrails (and a faster speed limit)---and what's this?: a median strip!  Still with driveways thrillingly directly off the road here and postmen's trucks pulled maximally far to the side attending to mailboxes there, and thanks to the twin concrete interstates not terribly far to the north and south very little traffic.  And hills! Ten and fifteen percent grades where a modern highway would have razed hills to fill valleys. Then back to Main Street and stores, and a traffic light per town. It was like driving through the 1950's, but in a diesel Volkswagen, and with GPS.

On the way back we stopped at a Pilot station to fill back up next to the gigantic trucks, only to find that the pump nozzles were about two inches thick.  A guy filling up his old family Mercedes wagon told us that it works, but you have to dribble the gas in really slowly. “They're catering to the truckers.” Well, there was no way I was doing that, so we stopped a few dozen miles later at a rest area off of I-90, where (of course) the pump (singular) was way off to the side, where there was no credit card swiper on the pump, and where the ground was black with spilled oil (presumably).  But it filled the car in something like thirty seconds.  Easily the fastest gas pump I've ever used.

At any rate, we discovered that the satellite radio is awesome for about half an hour, after which one realizes that there are so many stations that they're all either totally generic and all over the map, thereby including entire families of music I abhor, or so completely specialized that after five songs (or was it ten? or two?) you can't tell where one song begins and the other ends.  Touching the tuning buttons on the steering wheel causes the weather info station to come on; I haven't invested the time required to set up some presets, and I likely won't. One is extra glad for the auxiliary input jack.

Putting miles on this thing pretty fast.  Guess it's fun to drive, or something.

 

2,190 miles (14.3 gallons @ $3.099)

[July 29] So I finally located a gas station with a normal pay-at-the-pump diesel pump, but ended up paying at least 10 cents extra for the privilege.  The range indicator on the trip computer is surprisingly casual about telling you that there are only a few dozen miles left in the tank, so maybe it's time to think about refueling, please, before you have to sit by the side of the highway in your fancy new sta-wag with no fuel while a statistically large number of Massachusetts drivers on cell phones zip by; so the end of the tank kind of snuck up on me.  Not helping things is that I've been sitting in a ton of traffic lately, which of course burns fuel quicker, causes more riding of the clutch and use of the brakes, requires that the windows be closed to shut out all the crappy highway traffic fumes (there's always one horrible truck), all of which accelerates the emptying of the tank.  Alas.

The black interior is killing me, not because it's bad nor because it's particularly hot (it's not), but because I keep seeing black Jetta wagons with tan interiors and they remind me that I should have gotten the tan interior.  On the other hand, I also saw an orange car driving down the street the other day, and it reminded me that I still can't get one of those.  Can't get a pony, either.  At the end of the day one remembers that these things are for getting you to places that are too far away to walk to, and nothing more.

Weekend salt air hasn't destroyed the car yet, but I should probably drag it to a car wash anyway.

 

 

 

Non-fill post

The weather has broken to the point that I actively enjoy being outside, but of course the sun has gone down and the family remains out of town, so I pretended it was twenty years ago (the mind boggles!) and went for a random drive on back roads I only barely know with the windows and the roof open. No music this time. The drill is to burn around on unfamiliar roads with only a vague destination in mind, probably get lost, and then get back home. Ideally, the whole experience takes under forty-five minutes and doesn't involve any traffic, nor traffic lights. I mostly hit neither. Three or four of these a week is how I survived the second half of high school.

This part of Massachusetts is much, much less rural than central Vermont—and the roads are as uninteresting and straight as that mostly implies—but it beats watching television.

I have decided that it's exceptionally nice, even in traffic, to have a manual transmission car. But I expect (hope) that this is the last internal combustion–powered car I'll ever have. I won't even really miss shifting all that much in our quiet electricity-and-batteries future, since one can't lug an electric motor.