don’t let anyone fool you, thirteen hours is a long time in a car. passing time with audiobooks helps! Some.
well into book one of “the janitors”. seems like it’s going to be a great series.
Tag Archives: tdi
adventures in transporting a giant pole for the treehouse spiral staircase.
i’m making progress on the treehouse spiral staircase and found a suitably long pole to build upon. and now i’m either going to make it 35 miles home with 7 feet of a 16 foot pole sticking out of my car without incident or I’m going to have a really good story!
the hardware store lumber dude who helped me load it in the car with a forklift exclaimed, “THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING!” which i took to mean he did not often load 16 foot poles into cars.
the optimistic twine amuses me. i don’t really think it’s going to do much to stop the pole from sliding out of the car on a steep hill ( and there are a lot of steep hills between the store and home ) but i felt like it had to do something.
[ later] well that was exciting! I forgot to bring something to weigh down the pole in the car. with about half of it out of the car it was on a natural pivot point so I had to actively hold it down for 35 miles which made shifting pretty tricky! If I ever find myself in need on transporting 16 foot pole again, I’ll definitely remember to bring something to weigh it down!
the results from beta testing the roofbag.
the beta test of the roof bag is a resounding success. we did learn that you want to fill up the bag as much as you can to get the straps to proper tightness and to avoid the sound of the bag deforming in the breeze. if you don’t have it completely full then we found it’s best to have space all filled up in the front of the bag, again to avoid excess bag flapping noise. some people said they had problems with strap noise with other soft carriers, but we’re old hats at straps from hauling canoes around and know there’s a bit of an art to getting them juuuuuuuuust tight enough to not flap but not so tight that the wind makes them “whine”. so no strap noise for us.
works for us! very affordable ( i think we got it for $60 on sale), easy to put on and take off, provides lots of extra storage for trips which gives us enough room to put the two dogs comfortably in the back ( which they loved! ). and there was even room of the roof to strap on a christmas tree for the ride home! the christmas tree is only being help on by “friction” of straps from the roofbag, so hopefully it stays put for the 6 hour drive!
about the only downside that i i can think of, is it doesn’t present much of an obstacle to theft so on multiday trips or while taking extended time away from the car during a trip, i’m not sure how comfortable i would be having our possessions a knife slit way from being stolen. but that’s not our most common “use case” which is simply taking long day trips from point A to point B which as few stops as we can manage 🙂
deer patrol, on high alert.
sometimes during the trip to the upper peninsula i try to imagine how many deer we must pass that are in the ditch, just out of sight. hundreds?
326/365. beta testing the roofbag.
on longer trips, especially since we take frida mostly everywhere with us, we’re often wanting more space in the car. on a trip to maine we saw a car with one of these roofbags and it looked like it might do the trick; affordable, waterproof, easy to put on and take off, and made in the USA.
we’re dog sitting for an extended period of time so on this trip to the upper peninsula of michigan it made even more sense to try out the roof bag so we could have both of the dogs in the space where the luggage would normally go.
so far, so good, although the dogs are a little confused 😃
will our luggage be scattered all over US 2? who knows!
278/365. life as a jetta TDI owner after dieselgate cont.
our mail person delivers a hand-signed ( uh, huuuuuuh, suuuure ) apology from the vw ceo and an invitation for a “free case review” for a class action lawsuit on the same day.
i guess it’s sort of better than finding notes on your windshield! or maybe not.
263/365. life as a jetta TDI owner after dieselgate.
i’ve been happily driving jetta diesels for 15 years. i have a lot of words i could say after dieselgate but maybe the most pertinent are “never buying another volkswagen” ( insert epic rant here that i don’t have time to write ).
perhaps the only solace i can personally take is that we’ve only been driving a polluter for about a year and the diesels we drove previously appears to have not skirted the emissions laws.
i hope the EPA fines them the reported maximum, $18 billion and we use the money to invest in pedestrian infrastructure ( probably not going to happen, but hey we can dream a little dream, right? ).
So, VW owes the U.S. $18B+.
I say we invest the money in bicycle+ pedestrian infrastructure for our cities. Make polluters pay for change.
— AlexSteffen (@AlexSteffen) September 23, 2015
i was leaving work and found this tucked under the windshield. i’m pretty sure it was meant as a lighthearted joke but the reality of the environmental impact of dieselgate is no laughing matter.
as i hopped into the car, i got a text message from a friend in michigan. sigh. i had conversations with several current owners of TDIs that aren’t buying another one no matter what the company does and several people who didn’t own one but were considering buying and are now not going to. i think the long term implications for diesels in the US in general and vw in particular will be devastating. apple couldn’t have asked for better timing of a scandal as they accelerate their efforts to build an electric car as current TDI owners like myself, er, ride out their payment plans.