Last Saturday

My friend A has had someone staying at his place, a friend of a friend, who has some issues left over from a brain injury in the service. (he makes me feel very lucky not to have suffered more from my brain injury in the car wreck in 1998)

A is used to living by himself; for 14 years, he lived with and later married a woman with a big drinking problem (nice enough woman sober, but add alcohol and it’s like Instant Bitch) and is quite happy to live by himself.

I have gotten a plane ticket online for the guy staying with A – I guess I’m the "computer guy".  He flew to Texas last month and is moving there this month; I got his ex-wife a plane ticket online so that they can drive to Texas together and she can fly back alone.

Last Saturday, A asked if I could give the guy a ride down to Grants Pass, OR, to get some of his things from his mom’s house.  It’s a 526 mile round trip, but I had nothing to do last Saturday, and I like driving my car, so I said "ok" and we did the drive.

I do not smoke in my car – I never have smoked in my Caliber – so we stopped at most of the rest areas on I-5 to get out and stretch and to smoke.  We stopped at the rest area on the Umqua River, between Salem and Albany:

Part of the rest area was flooded.

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I like this rest area; on other days you can walk down to the river.  There’s a nice path under the freeway bridge to the rest area on the other side.  Not today….

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The Rogue River runs through Grants Pass; we stopped there after going to mom’s house and putting stuff in my car:

This one of the few rivers that gold was discovered on/in and this area saw one of the few "gold rushes" in Oregon history.  It didn’t last long.

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On the way north to Portland, we stopped in Roseburg.  There, in the parking lot, I saw the exact car I used to fantasize about in 1996, when I came back to the US:

A Ford Thunderbird in Teal Blue.  This was the car I wanted in the nineties; T-Birds in this series were great cruisers and rode really nicely on the highway.  My dream car then was a Thunderbird SC – in teal, with the super-charged V6 and a five-speed.  It was the most powerful T-Bird ever made (yeah, more powerful than the big block T-Birds of the 60’s)

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The Thunderbird Supercoupe has been out of production since 1996, so now the newest one is 14 years old, and when I could buy a new car, I bought one I had rented and liked a lot, the Dodge Caliber:

Well, the Caliber gets far better gas mileage than the T-Bird would have, and it doesn’t need Supreme gasoline, like the T-Bird SC does.  I did, for over a year, own a 2008 Caliber SE+, in a color very similar to the Teal Blue of the T-Bird, but I traded it in on this black SXT Sport.

Ahh.  I did rent four or five of those T-Birds in the early 90’s, when I lived in Japan and visited the US.

 

 

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