My American Car Experience – Part 2: The Silver Bullet

I’ve talked about my first experience of driving an American car, and this was the second.

A quick background to the story:  I first met Longtime and Very Dear Friend Trevor when we worked together at a small ad agency in Johannesburg.  He had just returned from a trip to the U.S., as had I, and so over the following months we swapped stories together and in the process, built a friendly relationship.  Sadly, my other relationship (with Wife#1) had foundered on the rocks of divorce, made somewhat more difficult by virtue of the fact that she worked at the same Small Ad Agency, but I left the company soon enough, so that wasn’t too bad.

Some months later I went to an art gallery opening in Johannesburg, and by chance Trevor was there.  I had planned a solo trip to the U.S. as a sort of post-divorce present for myself — just a month this time — and I started crowing over said trip to him.  Whereupon he confided that he too had planned a solo trip Over There, and when we compared notes, found that the dates overlapped quite a bit.  I couldn’t change my dates because I’d squeezed in the time between conferences and client meetings;  but Trevor had no such problems in that regard, and so the two solo trips became a double-header, so to speak.

I had made no plans at all for my solo trip, intending to wing it completely upon arrival at JFK, but Trevor had made plans to stay with a friend in Newport RI, and as I’d met her when she’d visited Johannesburg a little earlier and we knew each other, it was no problem for her to put us both up on the giant couches she had in her capacious living room.  Getting to Newport was another story.  I didn’t feel like renting a car just yet (particularly out of JFK #LongIslandTraffic), so our trip to Newport was as follows:  shuttle bus to Manhattan, cab to Grand Central Station, train to Providence, Trailways bus to Newport, where Maryann would pick us up in her totally-inadequate and tiny Fiat 124 convertible.  (As Trevor later put it:  “We missed traveling by hovercraft, but that’s about all we missed.”)

Anyway, we took care of jet lag in Newport for one of the most delightful weeks of my life:  eggs-n-bakey at Crazy Gigi’s for breakfast, clam chowdah at Christie’s Dock for lunch, lobstah at the Canfield House Restaurant for dinner, parties at the Boom-Boom Room [sic], flirting with lonely divorcees, and all washed down with huge quantities of bee-ah.  July in Newport is not an experienced to be missed.

Anyway, the time came for Trevor and I to begin what was to be the first of many, many trips around the U.S.  Here’s the itinerary:  Newport – Concord NH – New Orleans – Austin and back up to New England.

The map routes do not do justice to the trip we actually made, because we tried to avoid all interstate highways wherever possible (e.g. to get around major cities, which neither of us was interested in doing), using roads like the Blue Ridge Parkway and so on.  (The only major city we actually ventured into was Washington D.C., but our adventure there is a whole ‘nother story involving Congressmen, their various staff members and their family members, and I’m not sure the statute of limitations has expired for the telling of that episode).

Anyway, the car.

This time, because the rental was being picked up by my employer back in Johannesburg on the company’s account (another story), I’d reserved a mid-size car because why not? and when we picked it up at the Avis office in Newport, we discovered it to be the largest car either of us had ever driven in, an Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Coupe*:

…which featured a 3.8-liter V6 (not the later 5-liter V8, alas), but which, compared to the anemic 2.2-liter Chrysler Reliant engine, I thought would give us the proper punch for a very long trip.

How wrong I was.  This was my first experience of driving a car which, when one floored the throttle at 50mph to overtake, caused the rev counter to climb but the speedometer needle to stay in exactly the same place.  (It did not help that my “home” car had been a BMW 3-series two-door, which was quick, nimble and fast.)

Compared to the little Beemer (okay, compared to every car I’d ever driven), the Olds handled like a frigging supertanker, with a turning circle to match.  I swear, I could make a full quarter-turn of the steering wheel before the car actually changed direction, and then it would do so only marginally.  Parallel parking was a complete bloody nightmare, and after a day or so of this silliness I made sure that I only parked in drive-in spaces.

In short, the car was a major disappointment — sarcastically, we christened it “The Silver Bullet” because it was anything but — and it colored my opinion of American cars until… well, I still feel the same way about them.

Anyway, we survived the trip.  The Bullet made up for its performance shortcomings in other ways:  the plush velour seats and comfortable drive seemed to impress the several ladies we had occasion to drive around in our travel stops, and amazingly for such an inefficient car, the gas mileage wasn’t too bad as long as I didn’t go much over 50mph — which, given the back roads we mostly drove along, wasn’t too difficult.  And even more so than on my previous trip, we were in absolutely no hurry to get anywhere, so we lollygagged all over the place, stopped in small towns and villages along the way, met some strange but interesting people;  and in short, we both fell in love with America all over again and pledged to each other that we would soon come back for good.

So there’s that.

In Part 3, I’ll talk about my next disappointment.

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*the Bullet’s license plate was “VD 237”, which prompted the acidic comment from Maryann:  “VD?  They must have known you two guys were coming.”  She also warned us about New Orleans being the pox capital of the United States, whereupon one of us (probably me) replied, “Yeah?  Well after we’re done there, it’s going to be the pox capital of the world.”  (Sadly, ’twas not to be and we left The Big Easy unscathed.  Austin, however, would be another matter.)