Pliny the Forester visiting Albert the Bull, Audubon, Iowa, and...
...the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah, and...
...the giant arrows in Mancos, Colorado, and...
...the crossroads of Montana, and...
...Carhenge, Alliance, Nebraska, and...
...the Enchanted Highway, near Regent, North Dakota, and...
...the Cadillac Ranch near Amarillo, Texas, and...
...the Wigwam Motel of Holbrook, Arizona, and...
...the Launching Pad restaurant, Wilmington, Illinois, and...
...the Geographic Center of the U.S.A., Lebanon, Kansas.
Among other faraway places, Old Red took us to Pike's Peak, Colorado, and...
...Independence Pass, Colorado, the highest paved crossing of the Continental Divide in the U.S.A., and...
...and on its final road trip outing last fall, it took in the sights of Shinnston, West Virginia.
Old Red became a canvas of our collection of old-fashion travel decals, placed on the rear side window much the same as my family did on our '65 Ford wagon when I was a kid.
The end is near, my friends.
You can get very attached to a car, especially if you hold on to one for a long time. This is particularly true if you take a lot of road trips, and so it was not without a little bit of sadness that we bid farewell to not one but both of our durable road trip warriors in the same week. We've had our 1998 Subaru Legacy wagon, dubbed Old Red, for 15 years and took our first cross-country trip (to Yellowstone in 2002) in it. It also took us to Nashville, Niagara Falls, northern Maine and lots more. We've gone the most places in our 2004 Subaru Forester, which we dubbed Pliny the Forester, after Pliny the Elder, the early Roman Empire's author, naturalist and philosopher (too obvious?): three 9,000-plus-mile cross country trips to Los Angeles, Montana's Glacier National Park, and San Francisco from our home in Rhode Island, plus lots more shorter trips (Chicago, Atlanta, and Quebec to name a few).
I can say without hesitation I've had the best times of my life in these two cars and they've served us well. But since last December, both cars have been neck and neck in the beloved-old-car-turning-into-a-hopeless-moneypit sweepstakes. We've become close, personal acquaintances with their "check engine" lights and have been stranded on the side of the road in each car. We've poured way too much money into them, enough to buy half a good used car, only to have them back in the shop a couple weeks later for another $500 repair. The end of an era was approaching. We traded them both in for what we considered a handsome sum, considering how old and troublesome they'd grown -- almost enough to recoup our recent repair bills. And, true to form, Old Red's "check engine" light lit up on its final ride to the new car dealership. Now that's closure.
Farewell, old friends. God willing, we'll see you parked outside that big ball of twine in the sky some day.
