[V8] The first trip

[Roger Woodbury]

Monday we left in the morning for the first long trip in the V8 since it arrived here last May.  This wasn't really a pleasure trip as the "mission" was to be in Aberdeen, Maryland on Wednesday at oh-dark-thirty to see my wife's grandson graduate from advanced infantry training.

It's around 850 miles from here to Aberdeen, and that is normally within our one day range of travel, but we couldn't leave until just before noon, so we planned an overnight on the way.  Naturally it being March, not far into the trip it started to snow instead of the rain showers predicted.  Quattro minded a whole lot less than I did...I have gotten to the point in my life that I am simply not crazy about driving on the Interstate in a snowstorm.  Anyway, the trip down was benign and we spent the night just over the line into Pennsylvania.

Graduation over, we dropped the young private off at Baltimore-Washington Airport for his flight to see his girlfriend en route to Korea.  We headed back.

Wonderful trip.  We avoided the mess around NY City entirely by going through Danbury, and then on day #2, moseying down the Delaware Water Gap on a secondary road.  Pretty country that I haven't explored before, and we did it slightly differently on the way back, too.  

The V8 was simply outstanding.  It is hard to believe that this is twenty-year old automotive technology.  A year ago we made a trip to Asheville, North Carolina, from there to Chesapeake, Virginia, and then up the eastern seaboard back to Maine.  For that trip I rented a new Ford Fusion.  The Ford Fusion was a suprisingly nice highway car.  But comparatively, the V8 is in a different universe.  

My overall average speed (according to the computer) was around 55 miles per hour.  Naturally, if that is the average, much of the time was spent well above anyone's idea of a legal limit.  I didn't hurry.  I merely tried to stay with, or perhaps just a tad ahead of most of the surrounding traffic.  At one point I needed to get ahead of a bunch of trucks and a few slower cars that concerned me.  I was afraid that someone in the right lane was going to make a sudden move left, and I wanted to be gone from there before that happened, I am sure you know what I mean.  Anyway, I let it out just a bit, pulled about one half mile ahead and then back into the center lane, dropping the speed back to around 70.  

Very casually, my wife said, "did you hit a hundred?"

"No," I said.  "Just barely ninety.  I really wasn't trying."

"Yes," she said.  "Neither was the car.  It's amazing that this car is twenty years old."  And for my wife to be THAT relaxed, says something about the V8!

We averaged around 21 miles per gallon.  Once out of New England using gasoline that did not contain corn syrup, fuel mileage jumps about three to four miles per gallon, but the ethanol stuff that we get in Maine, costs me at least three miles per gallon.  I am experimenting with high test and will experiment with octane boosters, but clearly the V8 doesn't like ethanol.  

Now, a question for the "brain trust".  My car has no CD player.  It is a Bose, naturally, and the dealer that I bought the car from had all the amplifiers overhauled.  The Bose system actually works pretty well.  My wife likes music while traveling a whole lot more than I do, since I prefer the sound of the engine.  But there are many areas where there is no radio worth listening to (for us), and she has requested that we do something about a CD player before we take many more trips like this one.  

Now, I am just wondering if anyone has used a Walkman with one of these radios, or if I am going to have to plan to yank out the whole system and install a new CD player.  Then, after that, I am wondering if there is any such thing as a car audio cd receiver on the market that doesn't look like a juke box from a cheap New Orleans whore house?  

So the V8 is a winner, although I know that I am preaching to the choir.  This car will be around for quite a while, because there simply is nothing that I would replace it with that offers what it does.   

I didn't see another V8 over the entire 2000 miles, and for that matter, didn't see much of anything that was really interesting automotive wise.  Man!  There are an awrful lot of fugly SUV-things on the road!

Roger