You won’t believe this: 11 Crazy Things We Do While We Drive

This is from Reader’s Digest:  http://www.rd.com/slideshows/11-crazy-things-we-do-while-we-drive/

Perspectives from truckers, who can look down into our cars – and are probably more considerate than we ever knew!

 

Fun car and commute facts from AARP

The latest edition of AARP Bulletin has some fun facts about our use of cars and our commutes in the Jan.-Feb. 2012 edition.  Titled “50 Minutes on the Road,” the article says – among many other things – that the biggest distraction when we’re driving is talking to other passengers, followed by adjusting climate and radio controls (I had a fender-bender at an intersection one day while trying to memorize the lyrics to a favorite Dixieland Jazz tune!), eating, using a cellphone, taking care of children, reading a map – and grooming.  Grooming, for me, would come just after the Dixieland Jazz item, because that’s what I tend to do at stop lights. I know, I know.  But most of the time I’m headed to some kind of appointment, and I tend to forget things when I’m dashing out the door.

Missoula, Montana, from the trails at Blue Mountain south of town

Another fun fact is that Missoula, Montana has the shortest commute in the nation, at just 15.8 minutes.  Part of the reason is Montana’s low population base; it’s just hit 1 million people, but they are spread out over 147,000 square miles.  But the main reason is that Missoula is situated in a small valley at the base of five canyons, or other valleys.  The geography of the area is not wide open and spread out  The longest commute in the nation?  As you would expect, that’s New York City at 34.6 minutes – and I have to assume most of those minutes are spent on public transportation like trains, subways and taxis.

Another fact mentioned in the AARP article is much closer to home: it turns out that more people in Corvallis, Oregon ride their bikes to work than in other communities.  Portland probably won’t like that statistic.  But I don’t think anyone will be disturbed in Eugene, because everyone knows that Ducks swim.

Oh yes – AND THEY WIN THE ROSE BOWL!!!! (I keep trying to calm down on that one,  but it’s really impossible.)

Anyway… enjoy your commute or your distractions, but please balance them out!  Hope you are enjoying our warm winter so far!

More tips on winter driving

If you ever drive through (or even near) the northern half of the northern hemisphere during the winter – above or near the 45th north parallel – you know that the weather can change rapidly and unexpectedly.

I drove through a snowstorm recently – a brief one, not a bad one.  But it was a reminder that I’d neglected some important things about winter driving.  I ran out of windshield washer fluid, and had to stop and stock up.

As the storm got a little heavier, I remembered that there was no  shovel in the car, and I always drive with a shovel in the wintertime.  Why?  Because if I get stuck or if someone else gets stuck, it comes in pretty handing for digging out of the snow.  I didn’t manage to bring along any snow-melt, either, or just plain old rock salt.  You never really know when snow might be unexpectedly heavy.

I did have a small first-aid kit in the car; I never travel without one, even in good weather.  And I did have some bottled water.  But I didn’t have any food or chocolate.

What kind of food, and why chocolate?  Well, I favor cheese, crackers, and processed meats like salami.  Buying the little sealed packages of  these in the grocery story is not a bad idea.  And the chocolate is there for energy; if you get stuck, chocolate might just come into its own as one of the major food   groups!

Needless to say (consider the source of this blog, after all) you should be sure you have the proper winter oil in your car, and that your local quick lube – say, Pit Stop U.S.A. – has checked out all your fluids and performed a good winterization service on your car.

But perhaps the major tip for safe winter driving is that you should always, always tell someone where you are going; what route you intend to take; and when you anticipate arriving at your destination.  You should do this even if your cell phone has GPS tracking on it, as mine does; it’s just a double safeguard.  In you’re driving in the great American West, just be sure that you stick to the main roads.  Some of those backwoods logging roads can be especially treacherous in the winter.

This weekend, many of us will be hitting the road again to celebrate the New Year.  Let’s start it off right!  Drive safely; drive sober; and have a happy and prosperous New Year!

The cars – and trucks – in our lives

Somehow, that Thanksgiving holiday passed way too quickly!  In my family, it’s the Grandma’ – me – who goes over the river and through the woods to join family for any given holiday, an 8-hour drive.  I don’t know how long I’m going to be able to drive so far for a few days, but I do know that asking my daughter to pack up a husband and three kids (the youngest is 3-1/2) and drive that far is a major production – and, most likely, an interruption in school for the older boys.

This year, the drive got me to thinking about the cars and trucks in our lives, and what they mean to us.  I have a housemate at the moment, a woman originally from Russia, who grew up in Moscow.  There’s no need to drive in Moscow any more than there is a need to drive in New York City; there’s plenty of public transportation, and the crowded city streets make owning a car and driving a pretty unreasonable proposition.  So at my house, Natalia is gradually learning to drive; we live in a suburb, and there’s just no way she can get to her internship and various appointments unless she learns.  She remains astonished at how much the West is dependent upon the car.  But then, it was the railroad which opened up the West to white settlement, so speed and wide-open spaces were built into the idea of transportation here from the very beginning.

At my daughter’s house in northern Idaho – up on a hillside overlooking the stunning Lake Pend O’reille – not having a car is unthinkable.  Diana’s husband, Bob, is a relief pharmacist who works several days a week in Yakima, Washington, a 5-hour drive away; he’s home intermittently, for a few days each week or every couple of weeks, depending on the needs of his job.  As a result, Diana drives her three boys eight miles southeast to church on Sundays; 15 miles northwest to go shopping or to activities at the charter school the older boys attend; back eight miles southeast for a youth group that the boys enjoy, or for events like the annual 4th of July parade (in small-town America, those are the best kinds of parades!); and back 15 miles northwest for doctor’s appointments, getting repairs done on the car, or football and soccer practice.  She lives in her car, as do the parents of millions of teenagers.  Bob drives a little Ford Taurus for his long commutes to and from work; Diana and the boys enjoy the combination of toughness and luxury found in their Lincoln Navigator.

Because Diana and Bob live on some extremely rural, forested acreage, they also have an old beater truck they inherited from friends who left the area.  That old truck scarcely works, but it is pressed into service for trips to the local landfill and to haul wood off the property as needed.  This is the kind of country for which pickup trucks were invented.

For all the years that I lived in Montana – 24, to be precise – I had four-wheel drive or all-wheel drive vehicles.  These are necessary in the high mountain snow country, when you find yourself traveling somewhere in the state on a narrow, two-lane road that is getting pummeled by a harsh snowstorm.  I used to love heading south to parts of Oregon or California and to gaze in wonder at what I called the “land of shiny cars and convertibles.”  These weren’t new to me; I grew up in California.  But now those cars had become a novelty. How nice it would be, I would think, to have some sporty little convertible to drive around in on warm summer afternoons.  My mid-life crisis passed with my giving into the temptation – hang it all anyway!

I still have my all-wheel drive “baby SUV” – a Toyota Highlander – that I bought in Montana about 8 years ago.  With just 117,000 miles on it, I intend to drive it into the ground before giving it up for a newer vehicle.  It should go to 200,000 miles easily; and although I find myself, this year, drooling over the newer models, there’s just no way I can afford one right now.  I’m glad I made a good, solid investment in a good vehicle when I had the chance; next to the mortgage, it’s been the big-ticket item in my life.

That’s probably true for most of us.  Living in the West means, for the most part, living in an area that is heavily dependent on the automobile, and despite all our wishes to live differently – less dependent upon foreign oil, more environmentally responsible – that’s not going to change any time soon in this part of the country.  As a result, our love affair with cars continues.  When I first dated my husband back in high school, he had a royal blue ’57 Chevy station wagon with blue fur on the dashboard.  If you pressed the horn, you heard chimes. I remember the first car I ever bought in my own name many years later, a little green Chevy; and I so well remember the first rush of gratitude I felt in Montana after learning the benefits of a four-wheel drive vehicle in rough terrain and rough weather.  I cannot look at a Ford F-150 truck without remembering a ranch we once owned; was there ever a better ranch vehicle?

The cars and trucks of our lives: they aren’t merely practical.  They cause a rush of sentimental memory many years after their useful lives are over.

Ready for another La Nina winter?

How's the winter driving in your neighborhood?

That cold Pacific current, La Nina, is due back this year, for the second year in a row – and that likely means a long and difficult winter for those of us in the Pacific Northwest.  “During a La Niña year, winter temperatures are warmer than normal in the Southeast and cooler than normal in the Northwest. See U.S. La Niña impacts from the National Weather Service..”  From  http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/elnino/la-nina-story.html

When I lived in Montana, the only two winter conditions that would keep me off the road – or at least temporarily pulled over to the side – were black ice and a winter whiteout.  Whiteouts could come and go very quickly; often, if you just pulled over and waiting for 20 minutes or so, the weather would clear just enough for you to see the edge of the road again and be able to proceed, albeit pretty slowly.  Black ice is actually a little scarier, simply because it blends in with the road and you don’t know it’s there until your tires start spinning.

Living in the Portland Metro area or the Eugene/Springfield area of Oregon presents another kind of challenge – lots of winter ice.  For most residents in western Oregon, the winters are not severe enough to get people used to extensive winter driving, and that lack of experience shows up when bad storms do come through.   Add to that some good doses of ice, caused by the additional humidity of an area located closed to the ocean, and you have a recipe for lots of winter driving problems.

What can you do?  Slow down; don’t be in a hurry from now until the middle of spring.  You may be able to navigate the ice and any snow that falls, but you need to leave lots of room for the drivers around you – or coming toward you – who may need to  make last-minute decisions in a timely fashion.

Be sure you have the right winter tires on your car – either all-weather, super-rugged tires with extra thick treads, or studded snow tires if they are allowed in your local area.  If you don’t have those, then get a good pair of cable chains, the lightweight kind that can be attached with very little time and trouble.

How’s the anti-freeze level in your car; have you had the coolant system checked?  We do that at Pit Stop, of course; just remember to get that system serviced.

Carry flares, a first-aid kid, a blanket and a shovel in your car all winter long.  A shovel?  Sure; you never know when you’ll have to dig yourself or someone else out of a drift.  I tend to carry those little hand- and foot-warmers as well – the kind that start heating up as soon as they’re exposed to the air.

Don’t forget some extra food – power bars, chocolate, juice and of course water.  A little Sterno stove and some matches are a good idea if you’re heading into the back country or using back roads in your travels.

Is your cell phone charged?  Did you bring a charger that can plug into your car’s cigarette lighter?  Does your cell phone have a GPS built into it, or do you have one installed in your car?

In general, pack your car for winter driving as if you expect to be spending two or three days in a stalled car somewhere in the snow.  If you’re at all like me, you’ll throw in an extra change of clothes, a toothbrush and toothpaste, too!  I’m firmly superstitious about preparing for disaster: if I am over-prepared, then surely nothing could possibly happen.

Get a great deal at Pit Stop

We’re experimenting with our QR codes.  If you’d like to save a little money on your next Eugene/Springfield area oil change, scan this code in! 

The Dog Days of Summer

That’s what the long August days are usually called – the Dog Days of summer.  It’s the time when life has slowed to a crawl, and things just seem to drag on and on… kind of like the debt ceiling debate, but we won’t go into that.

There are back-to-school sales already; there are people taking vacations – or “stay-cations,” depending – there are still lots of kids at neighborhood swimming pools.  And while so much of the nation has been sweltering in dangerously high heat these past weeks, we’ve been lucky here in the Pacific Northwest.  We’d actually have liked a little more sunshine and fewer clouds; but at least it’s not 103 degrees.  Still, one of the strange things about August is that the days seem to drag.

But the underlying tensions seemed to have increased lately, don’t you think?  Whether it’s the debt ceiling problems, the terrible massacre in Norway, the general state of the economy – who knows – but drivers seem to be more irritable than ever.  Case in point:  I pulled into the parking lot of my local Safeway store the other day, and started to turn down one of the aisles.  There was a big van on the left, and then as I moved down further, I realized that a little black car next to the van was starting to back up – and I only saw that little black car when I was already partially in back of it – because the van was blocking the view.  So I tapped on my horn to let the little black car know I was there.  I couldn’t back up; there were people behind me.  The little black car stopped, and I drove forward a few spaces and parked on the opposite side.

The little black care came around the far end of the aisle, up the next aisle, pulled up opposite, and a girl rolled down her window and screamed “You could have waited!” and gave me the finger.

No unusual, I know; people get irritated over the smallest things when it comes to cars and driving.  But I think things like this are happening more often lately.

My plea is this: please be patient during these difficult times.  Nobody has it easy, that I know of; everyone is stressed.  Pull up to the stop light a little more carefully; use your turn signal, always; don’t tailgate someone in your hurry; plan five or 10 extra minutes into any given trip you take to run errands.  Don’t flip somebody off for something minor, especially when you may not see (or not see) what that person is seeing (or not).  Smile.  Think of something to be grateful for – like the fact that you have a car that gets you around at all.

Blessings count.  Count them.

Happy 4th of July!

For those of us in Oregon, summer never seems to get a foothold until on, or after, the 4th of July.  This weekend, though, the sun has come out a bit early, and the lure of the open road is stronger than ever.  Friends and neighbors have headed to summer cabins in eastern Oregon; to the beach; to the nearest lake – everyone so glad to enjoy the sunshine.

We know that you know not to drink and drive this weekend.  But have you taken any safety precautions with your car?  Get your oil changed, of course; but more than that, ask the guys at Pit Stop about the routine safety check they do on various things in your engine and under your car – even with your headlight and tail lights – each time they service your car.  Those checks can make all the difference.  If you have a loose hose or a belt, or if they notice a leak somewhere, your car may need some attention before you head out.  With this lovely, long weekend, we want you to feel free and secure and enjoy every minute.

Safe driving, and see you soon!

Classic car season

It’s nearly summer, and those great classic car shows have already started throughout the Pacific Northwest and the northern Rockies.  This coming weekend, June 10-12, there are shows up on the north Oregon coast in Tillamook; in Sherwood, OR; in Missoula, Montana; in Jackson Hole, Wyoming,; in Port Townsend, Washington; and in Canby and Medford, Oregon.  The following weekend there’s even an annual car show put on by the Helsinki Yacht Club in Butte, Montana – you’d have to know Butte to understand why there might be a yacht club there.

All of this brings back fond memories of a classic car in my own past.  It was a ’57 Chevy station wagon, royal blue in color, with light blue fur on the dashboard and a set of chimes or bells for the car’s horn.  It belonged to my boyfriend-then fiance then husband, now former husband (and, I’m grateful to say, father of my children).  We met in high school, and that was his car – and his first memory of me with his car was pretty horrific.  Our first date was to our high school’s homecoming football game, and I wanted to decorate the car with all kinds of crepe paper streamers, balloons, you name it – and I figured the best way to do that was by attaching everything with harmless masking tape.

Which would have been fine – had the car not just been painted.  I remember Jack politely asking me to please attach the tape to the car’s metal bumper rather than to any of the painted rear or side panels… and I remember the sound of a quiet panic rising in his voice.  The poor guy – here I was, probably the most naive person on the planet, just wanting to participate in a great party, and there he was, trying very hard to trust me with his most cherished possession.  We had come from two different worlds: he’d worked very hard for that car, and even trusted me with it the following year during his first few months in the Air Force.  To me, cars were a convenience and a necessity, but I had no idea what it took to run them or maintain them – even though I had my driver’s license.

Years and years later, I remembered the look on Jack’s face that afternoon as we got ready for the homecoming game.  I was trying to patch up a few scratches on my Toyota Camry, and finally took it in to be re-painted.  “Don’t use a brush in the car wash,” the guys at the body shop said, “for at least a year.”  A year?????  Oh.  And Jack’s beautiful Chevy wagon had just been painted the week before that game.

I don’t remember Jack holding the grudge; I don’t even remember if there were genuine tape marks in the paint, but I don’t think so.  I think he caught what I was doing in time, and put a halt to it.  I do remember we had a fantastic time on that date, and I do remember that car with great fondness.  I’ve never seen another car like it – not in my favorite classic car show up in Sandpoint, Idaho, which I’ve gone to with my grandsons; and not in car shows in Eugene or anywhere on the coast.  It was a one-of-a-kind – and it was the ’60s.  That probably says everything you need to know.

Holidays and Graduations

You can feel it in the air: tense seniors finishing final exams and final projects, downing caffeine, staying up all night, wondering if there really is life after graduation.  The stress can be enormous.  Many college graduates are older, non-traditional students who have gone back to school to get re-trained for a different job market; many of their younger counterparts will be competing with them for the same jobs.  High school seniors are worried about college or some other type of training to prepare for the future.  And, of course, all of you parents are checking your bank accounts!

On the road again…    Meantime, it’s good that we have one last holiday before most graduation ceremonies begin.  Memorial Day weekend is usually the first road trip holiday that kicks off the summer season, and most of us take advantage of it and go someplace to relax for a few days.  Whether you’re headed to the coast, to the mountains, or maybe north to Portland, Oregon has so much to offer — and Oregonians have always made the state’s best tourists. 

Is your car ready?  Do you have an emergency kit inside your car, as well as a good first-aid kit?  A flashlight and flares; a tire inflator and a jack; paper towels or rags and window cleaning fluid (I need that winter and summer, it seems).  What about jumper cables, you ask?  Well, there’s a very cool new gadget on the market called a Glove Box Battery Jumper – check in out here:  

http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/20110106/glove-box-battery-jumper/

It’s small, it’s convenient, and it works.  Someone used one of these gadgets on my car last fall, and I was amazed. 

If you’re headed out over Memorial Day, have a great time and safe travels!