ACADIA CARS

ALL THE BEST CARS HAVE BEEN BUILT:

I believe this.  Oh, sure.  Cars have gotten faster, smoother, and breathe cleaner exhaust into the atmosphere. They have more creature comforts and more gizzies and electronic screens to entertain the kiddies (I remember my parent's getting perturbed when my sister and I kept asking: "When are we going to get there?").  Cars get better gas mileage and I suppose are better able to stay intact when rammed into someone else's car.  But at the end of the day, care are mostly built to last only through the first lease, or 100,000 miles whichever happens first.  And for all of the glitz, glitter and hype about better and better, they are just awfully expensive depreciating assets. 

Americans in particular seem to think that their cars represent something special about THEM.  At the end of the day, cars are just transportation, and nothing, absolutely NOTHING else.  We have three cars in our home, and all of them are at least ten years old.  My daily driver is twenty years old, and it took me more than a full year to find it...it had only sixty-two thousand miles when I bought it a year and a half ago. 

All of our cars know their mechanic well.  We service every aspect of the car religiously because they will be in service here for years and years.  They will perform every transportation detail and duty that any new car will perform and just as well.  And one of the reasons that they will perform so well, is that they are examples of the best cars ever built.  And we will not see their like again, at anywhere near their cost.  They are perfect companions for travels though Acadia...and beyond. 

THE CURRENT FLEET FOR OUR TOURS OF GREATER ACADIA

1997 GMC SIERRA 2500:  "THE HORSE"  Or maybe an elephant or rhino.  This truck was ordered by some guy in Massachusetts and he hauled a large travel trailer or fifth wheel trailer of some sort some where that the truck lived for most of the year.  The holes for the fifth wheel hitch are in the bed.  I bought the truck from a used car dealer in central Massachusetts who had advertised it on eBay.  The second owner of the truck had a company vehcle so this truck spent most of every week in a garage.  The second owner had the truck for only a few years.  I bought this thing with 82,000 miles on it and it is now completing its third winter in Maine. 

Th truck was specially ordered. I was able to source the a copy of the original build sheet and the thing is as close to a 1-Ton pickup as it an get without actually being one.  Very handy on those very few times when I need to tow a small exavator, wood trailer or yank a Prius out of a icy ditch. 

There is nothing like cubic inches in the engine, and this one has 454 of them.  The truck delivers between 12 and 14 miles per gallon in regular use.  Less when the snow plow is hanging on the nose, like this: 

This truck isn't used for those little runs the grocery store.  But when a load needs to be hauled to the transfer station, or some real work to be done, this is the beast to do it.  When the new house is built the truck will have a garage.  I want this truck to be the last one I ever buy because there is nothing newer that is any better or will work any harder than this. 

February 10, 2011:  A friend of mine from the United Kingdom has sent me an email complaining that we may be exporting potholes to the UK since they have a considerable  number of potholes on the back roads there.  We in Maine know well the  story of potholes, and below is my reply to him:

Mark: You are absolutely correct. We have a new governor in our state, and for the first time in more than thirty years, the Republican Party controls both houses of our legislature and the office of governor.


The governor has promised to make Maine a more friendly state for companies to do business in and his administration will do more to help create employment here. Maine has for too long been hostile to business, and most of the traditional businesses in Maine have been driven out because of the high cost of employment, high taxes and high utility costs.


Pothole export is obviously one of Governor Le Page’s new ideas. Exporting one of our main products: potholes. Here in Maine we grow potholes almost as fast as fir trees or moose, so it is an obvious win-win proposal for the governor and for the environmental lobby, since potholes are merely a byproduct of using our fragile and ancient roadways and by themselves require no fossil fuel generated electricity to manufacture.


There has been legislation passed at the Federal level recently that has allowed heavy trucks using the Interstate highway to have gross weights of 100,000 pounds, obviously in an attempt to support our need for a larger pothole crop. I have also heard that a group of farmers from the north central part of Maine (Aroostook County)…an area roughly six times that of Dorset…have just received a subsidy from the Federal government to turn otherwise productive potato fields into pothole producing roadways.


This is no small matter. The pothole industry is in fact in trouble due to rising costs of certification of export. There may soon come a time when the “Made in Maine” label will no longer appear on exported potholes. The US Department of Defense, and the US Department of Homeland Security have recently been requiring extensive documentation for all large scale sales of potholes for export, and there are more and more countries that have been placed on the embargo list. Imagine what a terrible thing it would be for Maine potholes to be shipped to Afghanistan to be used by Al Qaida or the Taliban!


Also on the embargo list is Iran. Iran will no longer be able to import potholes from Maine because it has been discovered that one of their supposed nuclear “research” facilities was actually a factory that was experimenting with developing Maine potholes into something called “MRE’s”. This was discovered by accident during a routine inspection by the International Atomic Regulatory Agency when one inspector opened a large crate of what the Iranians had claimed was the factory’s main product they called MRE’s, or loosely translated, Muslim Rations Exceptionale. Being suspicious, the inspector opened one of the packages. He logically expected it was probably something like a US Army field ration, (called: Meals Ready to Eat, or MRE for short). Instead of finding couscous laced with a smattering of lamb and some flatbread he found a pothole loaded with an improvised explosive device: obviously the letters “MRE” meant “Mine: Ready to Explode” and the made in Maine label was still sticking to the bottom of the pothole.


So we have fixed them! And no more potholes will be shipped from Maine to Afghanistan or Iran no matter how much they beg.


But not to worry: that only means all the more for you folks over there in “dear old blighty”.
Now, in a side note, CNN has reported that Prime Minister David Cameron has proposed a special tariff on imported potholes. Furthermore there is a rumor that a group of merchants have joined with the road workers union to protest the tariff, and they have developed a special “commando” group. They are training to wear American Indian costumes from the late 1700 period. They practice every weekend on boarding ships and throwing the chests containing potholes into the Thames Estuary.

You guys better be careful: that happened once over here in Boston harbor and a revolution started.


Roger