Counting cars…
When I met beth in late 1982, I was driving a 1972 Ford Gran Torino that got about 12 miles per gallon. The car was some kind of penance for my recent separation and divorce. It had about 100,000 miles on it and had been submerged in the 1982 San Anselmo flood. I got it cheap… I think I paid $250 for it. She owned a Honda Civic. When the Civic was about ten years old, she traded it for a Renault encore… an understandable mistake based on a pleasant rental experience driving all over the east coast that summer. In 1993 she traded the Renault for a Toyota Corolla hatchback. Ten years and 120,000 miles later the Corolla went west to San Diego where Matt drove it for a while, and Beth got a new 2024 Toyota Matrix with a standard transmission and front wheel drive. It was a fun car, with decent gas mileage and a year later I parked my Dodge Dakota pick-up down by the barn and bought the Matrix you see in the picture above. It was a lot like Beth’s except it had four wheel drive and an automatic transmission. Beth drove it this winter because it handles ice and snow better than hers. She liked it so much we went shopping for one just like it. (I can’t handle a cell phone, a cup of coffee and a manual transmission, so I was getting quite owly driving Beth’s car). Toyota no longer sells a Matrix with four wheel drive, but the RAV4 can be comparably equipped and it’s not all that much larger and gets about the same gas mileage, so Beth kept my little Matrix hatchback and we got the new RAV4 pictured above. I imagine next winter she’ll borrow my RAV4 because it handles better than the Matrix in snow and who knows what will happen next?

Running-in…
We picked it up yesterday, following a relatively painless car buying experience that included trading in the older Matrix for a fair price. Today we began the running-in, en rodage. Molly hopped into the back seat and before we left the driveway she christened the upholstery, en pukage. After we cleaned up the dog barf we headed out onto the open road, following two lane highways around the southwestern part of the state.

Above you can see Molly in Monroe, Wisconsin on a quiet Sunday afternoon. Monroe is a city of 10,000 or so people, the county seat for Green County, populated largely by Swiss, a place where beer is brewed, cheese is made, and the citizens are pleased to pay taxes for a fine public public school system, and decent public services. It has a beautiful County Courthouse, pictured here. After cruising the town square we headed west and came to the Browntown-Cadiz Springs State Recreation area where we took a little hike around Beckman Lake. The place was practically deserted and we let Molly off the leash. She embarked on a mad romp of sniffing and marking, sniffing and marking. When we rounded the last corner on the trail and were heading back to the parking lot, a fox ran out ahead of us. Molly is a willful bitch, but today she decided to respond to voice commands. The fact that she stopped chasing the fox after only a few steps and came back to us made me inordinately happy. I mean, you expect your dog to be somewhat obedient, right? So why was I so tickled?

Out of Browntown-Cadiz Springs we went west a few more miles into Lafayette County, then headed north through Darlington, the county seat. Darlington has a distinctive old County Courthouse too. A few miles north of there we went through Mineral Point, an old lead mining town, and turned east toward home.

We put almost 150 miles on the car this afternoon and got home in time for a quick game of Frisbee with the obedient dog and some leftover pizza for dinner.

[tags]badger state, bad dog, good dog, new car smell, out gassing, dog vomit[/tags]