Why Train Travel Is Better

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and subtle insinuations of mild sensuality.

Introduction

 Six years ago I blogged (here, here, and here) about my family’s trip on Amtrak from the Bay Area to Chicago.  Well, we’re at it again.  I’m typing away from the observation car as the train makes its way through the mountains east of Grand Junction, Colorado.  Our destination this time is Denver.

(As far as you know I posted this after the fact and/or we’re flying straight home from there so by the time you read this it will be too late to burglarize our home.  Or maybe not … maybe this is the beginning of a long vacation, in which case you’re welcome to try to steal our sentimentally valuable but commercially useless family heirlooms, though you’ll have to deal with our psychotic gun-nut house-sitter and his meth-fueled pit bull, who never knew his father.)

Having tackled the overall train travel experience in my previous posts, today I’m going to give you the top 10 reasons why train travel is the best way to go. 

Reason #1:  Train travel is novel

Train travel is novel.  Flying has become as routine as taking a bus, more so actually, as has driving, and both activities get old pretty quickly (unless you’re driving on a cool highway like US 50).  And on the train if you get tired of your coach seat or sleeper car berth, you can mosey on up to the observation deck, or down to the lounge, and at mealtime you get to sit in the dining car (and actually, the Amtrak food is pretty darn good).  At bedtime if you’re in a sleeper you fold down one bed from above and turn the seats into another bed, which is really fun for kids (I think this gave my younger daughter goose bumps the first time).

The train stops from time to time, in places more rustic and less bland than the convenience stores along an interstate.  You can step off the train for a little fresh air.

Reason #2:  Flashers

Also, if you take the California Zephyr route you’ll cruise along the Truckee and Colorado rivers, where there are lots of rafters, and your chances of being mooned or flashed are very high.  It’s a long-standing tradition, apparently, for young men to moon the train, or young women to pull up their shirts or bikini tops for the benefit of Amtrak sightseers.  When my brother took his kids on this train back in ’05 they were flashed by rafters, as was my wife in ’06 (while my head was, alas, turned the wrong way).  And while I was sitting here peering into my laptop just now, a rafter flashed the passengers to my right.  I’m so bummed to have missed that.  Serves me right for writing this instead of just gazing out the window and watching life go by.  I hope you’re happy.

Reason #3:  Better for the planet

Wikipedia reckons that “a train seems to be on average 20 times more efficient than automobile for transportation of passengers, if we consider energy spent per passenger-km.”  They base this on an assumption of the car getting 39 mpg, which is far better than most cars get, especially with a bunch of luggage and/or bikes fastened to the roof rack.  In contrast, Wikipedia estimates that a passenger train gets 468 passenger-miles per gallon of fuel.

I’m not sure how Wikipedia gets their “20 times more efficient” figure because they don’t show their work.  My Volvo gets about 28 mpg on the highway, so with 4 passengers that’s 28*4 = 112 passenger-miles per gallon, which—compared to the train’s 468 passenger-miles/gallon—makes the train look only 4.2 times as efficient as a fully-loaded automobile.  I’m not going to ponder this disparity at length, because I’m more interested in comparing a train to a plane.

Wikipedia estimates that an Airbus 380 (the dumpy plane most of us tend to fly) gets 78 passenger-miles per gallon.  That means the train is 6 times more efficient (per passenger) than the plane. On top of that, the plane is polluting up in the atmosphere where the emissions do the most damage.  The so-called “climatic forcing” effect of jet aircraft means that although “per passenger a typical economy-class New York to Los Angeles round trip produces about 715 kg (1,574 lb) of CO2,” this is “equivalent to 1,917 kg (4,230 lb) of CO2.”  That is, the fact of the aircraft emissions being high in the atmosphere increases the environmental damage by a factor of 2.7.  So the train is actually about 16 times less bad for the environment than a plane.  In other words, for the environmental cost of one family vacation involving air travel, we could take 16 train trips of equal length.

If these numbers start to make your head swim or your eyes glaze over, here’s a more interesting way to express the efficiency of trains:  in 2007 a man dragged a 7-coach train weighing almost 300 tons along its track for more than 9 feet, using his teeth.  This is possible because the steel-on-steel interface between the train wheels and the track incurs so little friction.  (You think that guy could lift even a small single-engine aircraft off the ground with his teeth?)

A final environmental consideration:  the benefit of your choice doesn’t end with your train trip.  Amtrak pays freight train companies for the use of their tracks, so by supporting Amtrak you’re also supporting the railroad freight industry, which is far greener than long haul trucking.

Reason #4:  Can be cheaper

If you can tolerate coach class—where the seats are way bigger than an airplane’s, by the way, with far more legroom—Amtrak can be very inexpensive.  I’m sharing a table in this observation car with an lady who is traveling from Winnemucca, NV to some town just outside Chicago for under $280, round-trip.  The gal across the aisle is going from the Bay Area to Denver and the total tab, one-way, is $222 … which covers herself and her two kids.  (Full disclosure:  this was her original cost, but a couple days before her trip, Amtrak ran a special on the sleeper car so she upgraded for “not much money.”)

The sleeper car is generally a lot more expensive than coach, but I sprung for the sleeper car because this is our big vacation for the year.  It was worth paying extra just to be able to tell my kids, “We’re livin’ large as possible, posse unstoppable, style topical, vividly optical.”  I can’t make this boast with air travel because first class there is way too much money to even consider, and the seats are still smaller than even the coach seats on Amtrak.  (Each seat in the sleeper cabin is wide enough for two.)

Reason #5:  None of the airline bullshit!

I hate flying.  Going through the security check, and having to take off my shoes (even though the one guy who tried to smuggle explosives in his shoe got caught), and having to drink up or forfeit my water, and let some guy pat me down so closely I expect him to ask for my phone number afterward, and then having to take my bag over to some table where somebody runs a little cloth swab all over it to check for explosives—as if!—and then, once I’m finally on the plane, being deprived of legroom, food, even peanuts, and invariably being seated right above the wing with the jet engine shrieking in my ear, and having the baggage policy get ever stingier practically every time I fly, and being asked to pay—get this—$150 each way to bring my 17-pound bicycle on the plane … it’s all just such bullshit I can’t even describe it without the “-shit” part.  I tried to use “BS” but it just wasn’t enough.

On Amtrak, there is no security check.  None.  I mean, what are you going to do, hijack the train and make them take you to the Flagstaff, AZ station instead of Denver?  The Amtrak process is so simple:  you make your reservation, print out your single sheet of paper which serves as the boarding pass for your whole family, show up at the station 45 minutes in advance (no check-in required), and bring practically as many bags as you want, for free, and take them right to the train where you’ll have access to them the whole trip and never have to wait for them to come off the carousel.

And you know what?  If you’re not that organized, and you get a late start riding bikes to the station with your teenage daughter, and if Google Maps totally screws you by leading you not to the station but to a barren place across the tracks and more importantly across a giant fence from the station, so you have to spend an extra ten minutes racing around on surface streets, you can literally roll up with your bike less than 15 minutes before the train leaves.  At least, my daughter and I did, and incurred only a very mild, brief tongue-lashing at the ticket counter, where I paid $10 each to take our bikes on the train.  And the bikes, un-boxed (because Amtrak had run out of boxes), didn’t have to go through some system of conveyor belts like at an airport, which present some danger to the bikes, which danger the airlines—being dicks about this, like everything—accept no liability for.  I put the bikes on a luggage cart, and the conductor said they’d just be leaned on a wall and lashed down.  Simple.

Reason #6:  Less stressful than driving

Driving is a leading cause of accidental death.  Even if you’re the best driver ever, you’re sharing the road with drunks, and irresponsible young men who think driving fast is a game, and drivers who just plain suck.  And you have no control over the weather, which can turn your road trip into a nightmare.

With a train, you’re responsible for  getting yourself to the station and that’s about it.  Then you can read, sleep, look out the window, play a board game, blog, or take advantage of the seventh reason why trains are better.

Reason #7:  Friendly fellow passengers

It is technically possible to have a good conversation on an airplane with a fellow passenger, but highly unlikely.  First of all, your only opportunity is with the person in the next seat, vs. wandering around a train with the opportunity to chat up anybody who seems friendly.  Second, most air travelers are too angry, too tense, and/or (if they’re on business) too preoccupied to want to chat.  In my experience, everybody in the Amtrak observation car is there to soak up the view and relax.  I’ve conversed with several friendly passengers today.

Conversely, if you don’t feel like chatting, you don’t have to be rude to the person in the (assigned airline) seat next to you who keeps asking what you’re reading instead of letting you read.  On a train, you can just return to your seat, or into your sleeper car where you can close the curtain and/or door.

Now, if you’re sharing an automobile with your favorite people, of course you can chat with them, but only to a point.  If you’re the one driving, you shouldn’t get too caught up in the conversation or you’ll become that “distracted driver” that is such a menace to society.  (Once, at the end of a 6-hour drive, I missed the exit to my mom’s town because I was so caught up in reciting the poem “Kill My Landlord.”)  If you’re not driving, you need to take care to not distract the driver too much.  And you can’t have a good conversation with your kids because they’re too busy fighting in the backseat, and dispensing toilet paper out the window to make comets, and fussing, and squirming, and asking, “Are we there yet?”  On the train you can split them up, banish them to their sleeping room, or tell them to go pester the conductor about the ETA.

Reason #8:  Better scenery

The view from the tiny plastic airplane window is okay during takeoff and landing, but once you’re at cruising altitude you’re usually too far up to see much.  Occasionally the pilot will get on the PA and say, “Those of you on the right side of the aircraft can see the Grand Canyon down there … looks a little like a cracked lip.”  Often there’s cloud cover below the plane so you can’t see anything at all.

The view from an automobile is better, but you still don’t see as much.  Train tracks sometimes go through places that don’t have roads.  I’ve been looking out at the Colorado River and the gorge it winds through, and it’s pretty impressive.  The tracks go through less developed areas so the landscape is often especially impressive.

Right now the train is threading its way between Routt National Forest and Arapaho National Forest, near the towns of Kremmling, Heeny, and Sheephorn.  Have you heard of these places?  Of course not, and that’s the point.  (“I used to live in Kremmling,” a friendly fellow passenger just piped up, having perhaps read that over my shoulder.  “One saloon and one cabin.”)

Even familiar scenery can be completely changed by the unique vantage point of the train.  I’ve seen the Carquinez Bridge hundreds of times, but never from below, as I did yesterday.

There are even volunteer docents on some stretches, who will give you history about an area (such as the gold country or the gorge we’re going through now).  They don’t just drone on either; they’re pretty funny.  “Look at that white thing way up on the bank there—that’s a Suburban,” one just said.  “That’s a teenager’s driving lesson.”

You also get to see cooler animals via the train.  On this trip my family has seen antelope; prairie dogs; some strange animal we’re calling a desert badger; a jackrabbit; mule deer; and even a T-Rex scarfing baby Ewoks like they were croutons.  (I made that last bit up to see if you’re still awake.)  Some animals seem curious about the train whereas no living creature has any interest in cars (except certain humans).

On top of all this, you’re not going that fast on the train, so you get a better look at everything.  (And you still get where you’re going sooner than a car because the train doesn’t stop for the night.)

Reason #9:  Don’t have to look at people

There comes a time during a conventional voyage when you get so bored, you may be unable to resist looking at other people.  How often have you been on a 6-hour flight and you get so stir-crazy you decide to head over to the lavatory, even though you know there’ll be a line, and you stand there looking out over all the other bored, irritated people, packed in like cattle, and you just hate them all?  Or you’re so bored during a drive that you start to look at every driver you pass, and in every single case they’re looking back at you, and you’re both thinking, “What are you lookin’ it?!” and it’s just kind of creepy?

I guess if the answer to those (albeit rhetorical) questions is “No,” then you’re a better person than I am, and you can have your boring interstate highways and jam-packed airplanes.  For me, boredom just isn’t a problem on a train, and there’s so much to look at, and everybody looks better to me because, like them, I’m so much more cheerful.

Reason #10:  No deep vein thrombosis or perforated eardrums

Okay, I’ll concede that deep vein thrombosis isn’t exactly an epidemic.  It’s the rare person who, due to being too cramped and still for too long, suffers a blood clot that moves through his/her system and causes a pulmonary embolism.  But it can happen.  What if you got one and died on a plane or in your car?  Wouldn’t that be a rotten way to go?  (“He died as he lived … stuck in coach” or “He didn’t die alone … his car veered over several lanes and took out a school bus.”)

Meanwhile, train travel is easier on your ears.  The pressure changes on a train are very gradual.  As you cross the Continental Divide, you might notice the foil on a single-serving coffee creamer start to bulge, but you won’t feel much in your ears.  This train is at over 7,000 feet elevation right now and I’ve barely felt a thing.  Airplanes are different.  Cabin pressure is at cruising altitude is equivalent to 5,000 feet of elevation, and can decrease to zero in a matter of minutes when you land.  Once, I had a minor cold resulting in a clogged Eustachian tube, so when the plane descended I suffered a perforated eardrum.  This was absolutely excruciating and turned my ear into a geyser of blood and pus for several days, and required several follow-up visits with a doctor.

Bonus Reason:  Hand-to-hand combat

If you try to give somebody a real beat-down in the aisle of a passenger jet, you’ll probably get arrested when you land.  And an automobile is just too confined a space for a good fistfight—your elbows keep hitting things.  The sleeping cabin of a train, however, is private and spacious.  I could hear my daughters going at it from across the aisle.  They don’t pack a good punch, those girls, so neither was injured, but I think they had a good, satisfying tussle.

This was confirmed when I interviewed my daughters for this post.  Among the reasons my older daughter gave for preferring train travel was “Can finally fight it out with your sister once and for all.”  She even admitted that she was fantasizing a bit about being James Bond, who never boarded a train without having one final battle with this or that nemesis.  (And for the record, upon reading over my shoulder just now, she has assured me that she was pulling her punches and actually could have done serious damage.  Maybe on the way home?)

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From the Archives - Farewell, ‘84 Volvo

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Introduction

A year ago today I drove my beloved ’84 Volvo to a wrecking yard to be utterly destroyed (in exchange for $650 that Alameda County paid me to get my “gross polluter” off the road). To commemorate this anniversary I am posting here my farewell letter for the car (that I’d sent around as my holiday newsletter that year). But first, here is a movie I made at the Goodbye Volvo party that morning:



Farewell, ’84 Volvo - December 23, 2008

I’m going to share with you a long goodbye to the only car I’ve ever owned.

For awhile it seemed the car would live forever, a position emphatically held by our stellar Volvo mechanic. But alas, after more than a decade of solid service the car began to deteriorate rapidly, such that our program of maintenance came to seem like one of hospice. A shocking turn of events this past June led us to finally replace our beloved car. What follows is a eulogy of sorts, in the form of a timeline of the car’s life, told in fond memories.

AD 1984 – Our car, a grey Volvo 240GL wagon, is born in Gothenburg, Sweden. Over the next twelve years, it has at least one owner, perhaps several—who knows? Eventually it is sold to an independent used Volvo shop in Richmond, California where it becomes the errand vehicle during its Corduroy-like wait to be given a good home.

February 16, 1996 – We haven’t had a car in two years (since Erin had a company car), but Erin now needs a car for her new job. She meets our mechanic for the first time, and purchases our Volvo from his shop for $3,994.45 ($3,500 plus the tax, smog, license, registration, etc.). Mileage: 206,000 (with a newly rebuilt engine).

February 20, 1996 – My second time driving the Volvo. Erin is fighting a flu, and—after a terrible hour-long commute in the dark and rain from Fremont to San Francisco—doesn’t feel like driving around looking for a parking spot. I head to Hyde Street, a grade so fiendishly steep that most people won’t park there. Using a driveway to turn around, I stall the car. I sit there trying to crank the engine, with a chorus of angry honking cars piling up behind me. I decide to try roll-starting the car. I roll backwards down the hill, in the rain, in the dark, and did I mention on one of the steepest hills on planet earth? Soon enough I have a good head of speed, and I pop the clutch. The car dry-heaves, but I get nothing out of it. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, I am losing vacuum pressure in the power brakes, and they began to get harder and harder to apply. (No engine means no power brakes; as a freshly minted motorist, I don’t understand any of this at the time. I simply assume things are taking on the semblance of a nightmare, the one where your car is rolling toward a precipice and you can’t brake hard enough to stop it.) Now I’m starting to get closer to Bay Street, a major thoroughfare; after that, open ocean. I’m not dead yet, but I’m fairly hurtling down the street with an occasional heave as I pop the clutch. Suddenly I spot a gap between two cars: if I can just get the car pulled in there, I’ll be saved! Miraculously, I end up perfectly parked, two inches from the curb. Lessons learned: 1) this car has a loose ignition wire; and, 2) this car is easy to parallel-park because it’s got a really tight turning circle.

October 20, 1996 – An airport shuttle van backs into our Volvo at an intersection. The driver tries to claim Erin rear-ended him. Witnesses scare him into submission. $987.48 in damages.

November 30, 1997 – A huge pickup truck backs into our Volvo at a gas station. Because the driver starts his trajectory from at least fifty feet away, I watch in horror as the disaster unfolds before me. I don’t have time to start the engine and back up, but I have time to honk the horn, which gets the attention of the gas station cashier, who becomes our star witness. The driver tries to weasel out of paying for the repair, and I eventually have to call his insurance company directly. Why do these jerks have it in for the grille of our innocent car?

February 15, 1998 – As of the two-year mark, the car has been costing us six cents a mile to operate. We have virtually no problems until a ski trip with Kari, Erin’s friend from the newspaper. On the way back from a ski resort near Truckee, we get stuck in a horrible blizzard, and the windshield wipers go out. I have to drive along with my window down, manually dragging the left wiper across the windshield, the car sliding all over the road. Kari seems certain that we are all going to die. The blizzard closes the highway and we have to get a motel in nearby Reno. When we have finally returned to the Bay Area, Kari affectionately dubs our car “the PLP” (from its license plate, 3PLP090), and to this day she looks back fondly on our shared ordeal, as one would a mining shaft cave-in we survived together.

February 27 thru March 6, 1999 – The PLP, parked on Lombard Street at Hyde, won’t start, despite my attempts to roll-start it, jump-start it, and charge the battery. I put in a new battery but it still won’t start. So I decide to just leave the car for awhile and at some point have it towed to the shop in Richmond. The following Friday, walking home from dinner, Erin and I decide to visit the car. Imagine our surprise when it’s gone! Turns out it’s been towed because a TV crew was filming “Nash Bridges,” and it’s actually illegal to park on the street where a TV crew is filming, even if you were there first. So I have to go to the police impound lot, pay a ticket, and pay for the towing and storage of the car ($275). But I can’t get the car out, even after dinking with some fuses and attempting another roll-start. I end up getting a tow truck driver there to tow the car to his shop for $70 in cash. I don’t actually have the money, so our mechanic spots me, in the process unknowingly achieving legendary status with the Albert family. He discovers that when I installed the new battery I neglected to attach some secondary cable to the positive post. He shakes his head in disbelief at my cluelessness, but doesn’t charge me for the repair—the black comedy of my utter humiliation is more than adequate compensation for his work, at least this time.

September, 1999 – Erin and I drive the PLP to Moab, Utah for vacation. The car performs very well—in fact, we make remarkably good time. On the way back, we’re pulled over in Nevada. “Do you know why I pulled you over?” the cop asks. I tell him, “Frankly, no, officer.” My speedometer said 100, and since the odometer has always read 30% high (I know this from watching mile markers), I’d always figured 100 was actually 70, the legal speed limit. I explain this. “I clocked you at 85,” he says. “Well, then, I’d say my speedometer is only 15% high, officer. My mistake.” He writes me up for 80 mph—a misdemeanor in Nevada, with no insurance repercussions—and dings me $40. A small price to pay, after 3½ years of unbeknownst speeding.

August 17, 2001 – We drive the PLP to Sacramento to Erin’s friend Melissa’s wedding rehearsal dinner. Erin, more than eight months pregnant, is suffering in the terrible heat because our A/C isn’t working (never did). We arrive drenched in sweat, Erin’s face bright red, her damp, limp hair plastered to her forehead, a stark contrast to her cool, perfumed friends in their crisp dresses. As these friends worry aloud about Erin’s health and safety, and we think about all their shiny, late-model cars in the lot outside, we feel like sheepish martyrs to a liberal Berkeley Volvo-belt ideology. We take to bringing a spray bottle in the car for summer trips to Sacramento, to spray the mist directly into the vents.

September 9, 2001 – Alexa Coral Albert, age two days, is taken home from the hospital in the Volvo. Unlike my brother Bryan’s first child, who started bawling upon seeing the ‘67 Dodge Coronet she’d be riding home in, Alexa has no response to this first indication of the kind of family she’s been born into. Erin and I are unable to believe that Alexa is actually coming to live with us, that we’re not just having her over for a visit before returning her to the experts at Alta Bates hospital.

January 27, 2002 – Two weeks after Erin has returned to work after maternity leave, we take a day trip to Sacramento to visit her family. That night on the way home, Alexa starts screaming, for no apparent reason, and then suddenly three terrible things happen at once: Erin says, “Oh [drat]!”; the oil light of the car comes on; and the PLP loses all power and—in a crazy parody of sports car marketing claims—goes from 60 to zero in 2.9 seconds, grinding to a halt on a narrow median between I-80 and an on-ramp. Erin tries in vain to restart the car. We wait for a break in traffic and I push the car over to the shoulder. As we wait for the CHP to notice us, we realize Alexa is running a fever—her first childhood illness. Eventually a towing guy happens upon us. Erin and Alexa ride in the tow truck cab while I ride illegally in the PLP, and he drops us off at Erin’s grandma’s house. The towing guy agrees to tow the car all the way to Richmond and drop it off at the shop. The next day, Erin’s mom drives us home, where Alexa’s fever hits 101. I call our mechanic and ask if my car got there, fearing the towing guy has dumped it off the side of the road somewhere, or sold it to a moneyed, insane person with a fetish for ancient Volvos. To my surprise, he replies, “It’s fixed!” So: AAA roadside assistance (including tip): $20. New timing belt, oil change, and smog: $303.96. Our mechanic: priceless.

Oct 31, 2003 – Lindsay Reese Albert, age two days, is taken home from the hospital in the PLP.

Summer 2004 – My boss and a colleague mount a campaign to get me to replace my car. “I know you can afford it,” my boss says. This campaign will continue for four more years.

Dec 26, 2004 – Our family gets caught in the snow driving back from Oregon. Lighted signs declare that drivers must use tire chains. I pull onto the shoulder and screw with our chains for awhile. The instructions are gone. The chains seem much, much too short. Given the needlessness of chains here—the snow is melting upon impact with the road—I become too angry to continue my effort. I get back in the car and drive on until I find a tire chain professional. He spends a good 20-30 minutes fighting with the chains, during which time he has me pull forward and then roll back dozens of times. He finally finishes, and I breath a sigh of relief that I didn’t gas him or run him over. Now the car drives like hell, tires thumping every revolution—WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! Five miles from Yreka, the starboard chain burns up in the atmosphere and leaves the car. A couple of miles later, the left chain breaks and wraps around axle—my worst fear realized. I stop in town and buy a pair of bolt cutters, and drive to a garage. Their jacks are broken, but the mechanic lets me pull under his overhang to get out of the snow. I’m terribly claustrophobic, but have no choice but to crawl under the car on my back to cut the chains off. The car continuously drools black water into my eyes and ears, and I fight off the panic of my claustrophobia, but from the first successful snap of a link I know motivation is not going to be a problem. God that feels good, hurting the tire chain. I have to have that feeling again! It’s a rare thing to commit vandalism and effect a repair at the same time. Again and again I open the jaws, hunt around for a good bite, and crush them shut. I come up for a break. My t-shirt is soaked, my arms and hands filthy, my numb fingers cut up from dragging on the undercarriage of the car. I spit filth from my mouth and wipe it from my eyes and then get back to work. Finally I finish the heinous job and we’re back on the road. Twenty miles later, chains are required again, but I ignore the sign. We drive the rest of the way home without chains, among the careening cars and occasional accidents. Total duration of the 330-mile drive: fourteen hours.

Summer 2005 – On my way out to the PLP with Alexa, I see a baby squirrel fall out of the tree overhead, and it lands with a terrible thud on the roof of the car and bounces to the ground. As its mother races down the tree trunk after its precious child, our cat Misha comes out of nowhere and sprints towards it. Erin catches the cat while I investigate the baby squirrel. It is obviously suffering terribly and won’t make it. “Alexa, look the other way!” I yell, before smashing the baby squirrel to death with a rock in front of its horrified mother. A bad omen for our car?


July, 2006 – I spend a couple of weeks in France without Erin or the kids, and Alexa, who’s five, decides I must not be coming back. Remembering how highly Erin had praised our Volvo mechanic, Alexa suggests that she marry him, to replace me.

April 11, 2008 – Our last big road trip in the PLP, to Colorado during spring break. Having barely made it over Vail Pass during a blizzard on the way out, we decide to take I-80 home, which is the northern route, through Wyoming. Here, we come upon a stretch of highway where howling winds blow snow across the road in places, and the traffic polishes it to ice. Caught off-guard by a semi, I fail to spot a patch of black ice and we go into a terrible fishtail at 60 mph. Back and forth the PLP slides, and though I feel I’m on the verge of regaining control, I can’t quite right the car. Most of my brain is focused on trying to stop the sliding, but small part is saying “I’m about to crash this car at high speed!” and another part is saying, “At least this is a big safe Volvo!” Finally I give up and ditch the car off the side into the median, where we sink so deep into the snow that it comes up to our doors.

We wait for an hour and a half for a tow truck, while a stream of big rigs whiz past us, seemingly mere inches from our car. So much snow and slush is flung at us, the car gets sheathed in two inches of ice and comes to resemble a giant grimy grey Popsicle, or an artifact encased in filthy grey amber. Finally we’re towed back onto the road, and we continue our trip through a series of micro-blizzards. Through it all, and for the rest of the trip home, the PLP performs like a champ and attains hero status with the kids.


June 11, 2008 – Midway through Alexa’s end-of-school party at a park near our house, I run home to grab something and discover that a teenager has just plowed into the PLP with her parents’ car. The Volvo’s rear passenger door is caved in, and the exhaust pipe and muffler are on the ground. For the next several weeks I fight with the driver’s insurance company’s Total Loss Department, going through three useless (but stubborn) reps before finally prevailing and rescuing the Volvo from the salvage yard. Our mechanic fixes the car for $680 (some $5,000 less than the insurance estimate), but the used replacement door doesn’t match that well, and the remaining body damage—guaranteed to rust—begins the official countdown to the end of the PLP’s life.

June 15, 2008 – Erin calls Kari (the friend who’d been trapped in the blizzard with us in ‘98) and tells her the bad news about the PLP. Erin neglects to mention that I was hit by a car on my bike the day before, ending up in the ER with a separated shoulder and broken elbow. Kari is very upset about the car.

November 12, 2008 – Erin volunteers to drive two of Alexa’s classmates on a school field trip. One of the kids complains, “Your car smells like gas”—and she’s right, the whole cabin is engulfed in fumes. Erin is mortified, imagining how she would explain this to the girls’ parents (“At least the car didn’t explode or anything.… ”). Our mechanic discovers that the gas tank aperture has been damaged by a fuel thief. (The PLP’s gas has been stolen at least three times; in one case we found, beside the car, a short piece of hose and a pile of vomit from a poorly executed siphoning operation.) Our mechanic fixes the problem as best he can without replacing a bunch of parts, as we’re determined not to put any more money into the car.

December 7, 2008 – On a Christmas-tree-cutting trip to Sebastopol, the PLP performs just fine until about four blocks from home, when the cabin again fills up with gas fumes. We must now officially doom the car, and we begin shopping for a replacement. When Alexa catches wind of this, she begins weeping, protesting that she doesn’t want any other car, ever. Lindsay joins in the wailing protest. We promise them a “Goodbye Volvo” party, which only partly assuages their grief.

December 17, 2008 – We procure a replacement car (another used Volvo wagon), and the PLP is officially retired. We decide to junk our old friend through a local air quality buyback program. Total mileage: 375,166. Adjusting for the inaccurate odometer, we’ve put about 120,000 miles on the car in the last 13 years, and have spent $11,336 on repairs, which works out to $0.095 per mile driven. Total operational costs—fuel, insurance, repairs, registration, parking tags, smog, everything but the car itself—total $20,112.10 ($0.168 per mile, less than a third of the $0.505 per mile IRS mileage-reimbursement rate).

February 9, 2009 – I drive the car to Deal Auto Wrecking to be destroyed. The car still drives just fine. It starts up on the first try (though I’ve been charging the battery all morning, an extension cord snaked across the sidewalk in front of the house). Sure, the engine is loud, drowning out the radio, which croaks from the last blown speaker whose wiring is still intact. The seat isn’t that comfortable, the adjustment knob having broken off some months ago, but the car’s acceleration is smooth, the ride solid. As I approach the wrecking yard, I consciously enjoy my last-ever double-clutch.