| Monday, October 22, 2007 |
13:56 - No phone, no lights, no motorcar... well, no, that one's not quite true
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I'm one of the witnesses.
Ostensibly the reason for this weekend jaunt was to take part in this; but as the site says:
Exotics Rally for October 19th-20th has been postponed until Spring 2008. Due to promise of inclement weather spanning the entire weekend we received numerous concerns and cancellations from participants and therefore decided to postpone the Event.
We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused. Unfortunately sometimes Mother Nature plays a tremendous role in the outcome of these Events.
All the participants have been contacted and full refunds have been issued. The Gallardo Roadshow at Long Island Bentley/Lamborghini this Friday, October 19th, 2007 is on schedule and Exotics Rally is going to be present. Please come test drive a Lamborghini Gallardo and enjoy the food and drinks to be served. Please bring your ride as well!
Aw, c'mon. It was only a little rainstorm.
But Cap and I did bring "our ride", which was the aforepictured rented Gallardo:
   
I didn't get to drive it any, but I did get to try on the display pair they had at the dealership, after which they spritzed it with disinfectant to get my common-people cooties off it. And it was a pretty cool test drive—brief, but cool. I particularly liked how all the interior switchgear was straight out of my Audi. It's certainly a lot more peppy than the Lotus, largely because the gas pedal isn't sticky. Also it's unearthly quiet for a supercar. Talking in the cabin at highway speeds is no issue at all, which just shouldn't happen. If Audi has taken on itself the mission of making supercars (first this, and now the R8) that embody none of the usual supercar drawbacks, then they'll be making themselves some powerful enemies among the traditionalists out there. Particularly those who would gladly pay extra for a Superleggera that didn't have paddle-shifters.
Incidentally, I know Cap will offer a potent rejoinder to this, but I just have to say that I fail to see how the road network in New York is even remotely less confusing than the roads in, say, California. I mean, okay, look: you've got the Midwest, where everything is a N-S-E-W grid, and then you've got California, where the roads were all laid out in the 20th century, with no more routes surveyed than really needed to be laid—a given valley will have exactly one road in it, along the valley floor, leading from one sensible terminus to another. But in Westchester and Orange Counties, the map looks like someone sprayed it with Silly String. Roads crisscross and twist over themselves and double back and go upside down and through nonlinear-geometry time warps and Riemann surfaces until you can't even be sure you're in the same dimension as when you started. All these parkways and thruways and Rahways—they all resemble what would be full-fledged, long-distance, four-lane freeways anywhere else, but in New York they tend to do things like abruptly end in a traffic circle in a state park from which little dinky roads go zinging off in random directions and hurling you like a subatomic particle towards some distant hamlet that you're lucky to get to because of the crowds of deer jostling their way from the surrounding woods onto the highway every couple hundred feet. In California, highway label concurrency is rare and brief—a road will share a path with another road for maybe ten miles at most. But in New York, or anywhere east of Appalachia, you'll come to an intersection with so many highway markers draped on the signpost that it looks like the OSHA posters in the break room at work. 87 is also 287 is also 6 is also 202 is also 78113 is also the Beetle Bong Parkway (with its own special ornate round icon), but don't take the wrong exit or you'll end up on the Van Wyck's Neck Kills Throg's Dickey Bridge with a $4.50 toll. The lower Hudson is a picturesque place, to be sure, especially when traveling flat-out on fall-colored twisties with red and orange leaves swirling all around you and leaping up in clouds from under your screeching tires, but damn, it's a hell of a place to get lost in.
...And I mean that in the best possible way. New York is a different world in many ways, but they've sure got the living-life-to-its-fullest thing worked out pretty thoroughly there.
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Brian Tiemann
