We are in Wisconsin now. We got here in our Nordic Tug. It is our conveyance of choice, except that is when we are on terra firma. Then it is a Subaru Outback. The Subaru has a certain cache about it, but it is a boring station wagon. Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining especially when I am trying to get in or out of my garage in a blizzard. Then I think this is the best damn boring station wagon ever made.
What I am noticing here is the multiplicity of Harley Davidsons. Of course I know they are made in Milwaukee. I am not that dumb. But still there are a lot of them and everyone that I see is different. They are all customized to some extent. They are a labor of love, and I am sure that the gruff guys and gals that drive them dream of the low lumbering sound in the middle of the winter.
A friend just bought a hot rod VW. It is 4-wheel drive and for such a small car has a tremendous amount of horsepower. Of course this is not enough horsepower so it will be modified to have even more tremendous horsepower. It seems he thinks it is his last chance to have a muscle car and he is probably correct about this.
I have been thinking in a similar vein. After lusting over a suitable RV, that is if one can lust over an RV, and realizing that a VW camper van was not going to work, I changed tack completely. My new scheme consists of a used Corvette (I have wanted one since I toured the Corvette assembly plant in Tennessee) to travel from national park to national park. I figure I will lease it for the summer from CarMax and trade it in for something more practical in the fall. And for some strange reason my wife thinks this is not a bad idea. We will see . . .
This summer, as the last, we are spending three months on Carrie Rose. The only definitive date is to be in St. Ignace, MI by June 20. I think we can do this, weather permitting, but last year to get there a day late we had to motor through the Straits of Mackinac in the fog. My hope is not to repeat this again as I would like to grow old and cantankerous, and every hour spent in dense fog shortens a life equivalently.
Other conveyances I have dreamed of are vintage BMW motorcycles (I have an un-ridden one), a Mazda Miata, a two-seater Mercedes of a certain vintage, a BD-5 (look it up), a Thomas Morris Annie (another one to look up), a Nordhavn 46 (okay, I will quit telling you) and the new, not yet released, Honda Jet. This last one has made me rethink my life. If I had known it would exist I would have tried hard to make a fortune that I could then squander on a machine like this.
For the time being I am not doing too bad. For me it has always been essential to dream, actually daydream. All those idle thoughts that coalesce without knowing it, and then one day the stuff you thought you were wasting your time dreaming about comes true. It is amazing when it does. It is as if you need to be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.
I suppose this is what the conveyance is about. Not so much rubber on the road, water under the keel or wind over the wings. It is the realization of a dream.
June 2012
