The Economy

He's an asshole. I've driven many a mile on rural Texas Farm Market Roads - generally rural two lanes. When you come up behind a tractor or an old pickup pulling a load of hay, most times they'll pull over and run with their passenger side tires on the shoulder to make it easier for you to pass. Costs nothing to be courteous.

 

That’s easier said than done in the North Georgia mountains though.

 

There are long stretches on many roads where tractors have no options.

And on a state highway adjacent to their land, if they pulled over for every car, they’d never get anywhere. At some point during harvest time, they have to back up traffic for a couple miles.

Everyone understands this. You grumble and then realize they’ve been here for 200 years and wait it out.

 

And heaven help everybody if two sprayers meet on a rural county road with telephone poles.

Last year they had to scrape a car off a telephone pole that tried to zoom around a giant Massey Ferguson sprayer a mile from my house.

 

Around here, the sheriff's department will normally escort any tractors that come inside the city limits. Makes for some tight spaces along the interstate frontage roads as they come down.

 

The Tail of the Dragon is a stretch of state highway up on the North Carolina - Tennessee border by Fontana Dam. It's well known and popular with sports car drivers and motorcyclists because there are 318 curves in eleven miles of mountain road.

You get a similar effect when some noob in an 18 wheeler or a big RV follows the directions on his GPS and gets himself stuck into that stretch of highway. You could come around a corner and find that the road in front of you is full of stuck semi truck. Since there is a vertical rock wall to one side of you and a sheer drop off on the other, this can be disconcerting.

Many of the turns are blind. You just take the corner and stay on your side of the yellow line, praying that some hotdogging idiot isn't apexing through it on your side of the road. You're taking blind downhill curves that just dive out of sight, and a lot of those curves are such that 25-30 miles an hour is taking them fast... in a Miata. It's fun, it's stressful, it's exhausting.

 

@WriteThinking, Fiestas will be those great little cars everyone wishes they knew about at the time.

There are big Amish communities in middle and western Kentucky. I have some sympathy when tourists get stuck behind a buggy. For the most part, locals know better. There are too few places on the state highways where anyone can pull over and most do when they can. Of course there is a story to follow.

Wow. I don't know whether to congratulate you or not. Some of us seek that life off the beaten path and some of us find the road veers that way and we learn to love it.

Of course I have a story. I went to meet up with a friend who grew up in an Old Order Amish community. She was in town for the annual harness and equipment sale, which is more like an Amish county fair. While her husband was at the sale with their kids, we drove toward town. Cars were lined up and we saw why. Three buggies driven by teen girls were holding up traffic. While the first two eventually pulled into a church parking lot, the third driver wasn't having it. Every time a car would try to pass her, she would veer toward the middle of the road as if she was daring someone to go around. There were a few scary moments and very, very close passes as cars roared by her.

As we got closer, A. got a good look at the buggy and the girl driving it and told me pull up next to her. She was furious. She rolled down her window and shouted at the girl until she finally looked over at us.

"You know who I am, don't you?"

The girl nodded as her nose and eyes started to redden.

"You were, WERE supposed to spend a month at our house at the start of Rumspringa. WERE! Tell your mother we are going to have a talk before I go back to Louisville!"

I drove on while A. sat with her arms crossed, muttering to herself. The last I heard, Little Miss' time in the English world was delayed and then she eventually spent it in Bowling Green.

 

I could see that, for sure. I was genuinely bummed when I read online that the Fiesta was going to be discontinued. Because, honestly, the thought has occurred to me that, when my lease on the Corolla is up, I might actually get another Fiesta! Call me crazy...

I won't do it now, though, because I know I'd have wanted a new one, and that won't be possible anymore.

The one I gave to my brother? It's white -- it's a family thing: we all always only seem to get white cars -- but the car had an all-black interior. Which I hate. It's almost a deal-breaker for me to have the ubiquitous all-black interior that has been so predominant in recent years, in almost every car, because it's cheaper for the dealers (yes, I've asked why, because, in way-back years, I had cars with other interior colors -- red, blue, tan -- and I liked all of those much better than the black).

When I bought the Fiesta (new) in 2017, what clinched the sale was when the Ford guy said he'd send the car out to the upholsterers they use in order to jazz it up with a secondary, highlight color of my choice to break up all the black for $500.

I chose a silver that went well with the cloth covering of the inside roofing, and that looked sharp on the mid-backs and mid-seats in all the otherwise black upholstery. It was money well spent for an upgrade well worth it to me.

 

I was contemplating this weekend while staring at a sea of black, white, silver and gray traffic that someday I would like to be well off enough that I could order one in an actual color, instead of taking whatever used car deal makes practical sense in a moment of need.

 

I was sitting at at stop sign the other day, and seven straight cars/trucks that went by were all white. They were all various makes, models, and sizes, but they were all white. I said to myself aloud, "Did y'all get a group rate or something?"