"718Rogue" (562siast)
07/27/2014 at 14:21 • Filed to: None
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"718Rogue" (562siast)
07/27/2014 at 14:21 • Filed to: None | 3
| 2 |
By Sean Gallagher
Two weeks ago, a friend of mine approached me with an offer to accompany him in delivering a car to his friend, who had recently moved out to Nebraska. Well, as with anything involving driving, I was immediately interested, especially when he assured me that the flight back would be paid for. The car was only a stock Civic coupe, but it was a 5-speed and we would be driving through the Rocky Mountains.
So on the morning of Thursday, July 17, we set off from Long Beach, CA to Grand Island, Nebraska in a 2002 Toyota Tacoma PreRunner double cab TRD off-road.
Yes, our relocated friend's dad had, sadly, decided that the Tacoma, with its high ground clearance and knobby tires, would be better suited to snowy Nebraskan winters.
Our Tacoma was the most powerful model, which meant that it came with an astonishing 190 hp V6. Astonishingly slow.
The pickup's pickup and acceleration were adequate, but nowhere near fast. No matter how hard we tried, we could not get it to even chirp the tires.
As for the drive cross country...
It was terrible. One reason. Speed limit.
It was sometime around 8 pm, in the middle of Utah. I was driving, the sky was a beautiful purplish dusk, and shadowed red mountains loomed in the distance. Stars had begun to shine their sparkling pinpoints through the fabric of the sky, and I was excited to see my friends in Denver the next day. Other cars came into view only every several minutes, and the road was a long, straight shot - I could clearly see cars' taillights long before I neared them. The speedometer was hovering somewhere over 100 mph, just fast enough to make the slight undulations in the road surface mildly exciting. I was pretending that I was in a Dakar or Baja truck.
It was 2 or 3 hours after this picture was taken.
But it was just dark enough that I didn't notice the Utah Highway Patrol Charger sitting in the middle of the highway, and by the time I spotted him and hauled the truck back down to 70, I was already passing. For a second I had hope that he had missed me, but then the headlights went on, then the flashing lights...
He had clocked me at 98, but graciously dropped it to 90, leaving me with only a $150 ticket (the speed limit, apparently, was 75, although there was a section earlier that was 80).
The rest of the drive was relatively uneventful. Sadly, it was pitch black by the time we got to the Rockies, and I fell asleep anyway. I woke up an hour or so before the summit, and it was obvious that, thousands of feet above sea level, the truck was even more choked for power and could barely accelerate uphill. Nevertheless, we managed to keep it around 60 and never slow down. Once we reached the summit, I took over, and we were entertained by a GR Sti running downhill with us.
Although the trip wasn't as long, scenic, and relaxing as I had hoped, it was still quite the experience to drive literally halfway across the U.S. And funnily enough, I did end up driving a Civic, although it was an automatic 2008 sedan. Unfortunately, the road closures around the airport for the Color Run made me miss my flight back from Omaha, despite the dozens of traffic laws I broke trying to get around the detour in time.
And the most interesting car of the trip:
That negative camber.
Sometime this week I'll get around to writing about how I borrowed my friend's modified 1988 Celica 5-speed - my first time really driving stick - for the past 2 days, and give it a review!
Stapleface-Now Hyphenated!
> 718Rogue
07/27/2014 at 14:30 |
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Just look at the bright side. You would have been going faster in the Civic. And the cop probably would have written the ticket for the full amount.
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718Rogue
> Stapleface-Now Hyphenated!
07/27/2014 at 14:33 |
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I don't know about that. I've never driven a 90s Civic, but I can't imagine I would've been going too much faster.