on SUVs (long and not necessarily AC)

[Tessie McMillan <tessmc@domain.elided>]

Do you guys ever notice you can do some of your best reading at the 
doctor's office? Today I killed a few hours at my doctor's, spending much 
of the time perusing the battered literature in the waiting room.
Depending on which doctor I'm seeing (remember, we females are more 
complicated machines, kinda like Alfas, right Greg?) I usually come across 
recent Smithsonians, Architectural Digests, New Yorkers, Esquires, and 
what's that New Age health magazine... has a funny name that sounds like a 
drug... sometimes a Road and Track, a few WSJ's and SI's ... and if I'm 
*really* lucky, I can find a recent copy of Sail (wow!). Anyway, today the 
pickin's were slim and I had to resort to a stack of magazines by -- of 
all things -- the Thousand Trails club. Gack!

The club is for (primarily retired) folk who go around the country in 
their RVs, staying at various Thousand Trail campgrounds and engaging in 
the regional activities there. At first worried to open the magazine, 
I quickly realized this rag was a great treasure. To be specific, it 
was a HOOT. It had some great advertisements for things like RV-sized 
fix-a-flat, trailer hitches, trailer levelers (interlocking plates of varying 
thicknesses that you could stack and drive up onto with one wheel), plus 
the usual advertisements for refrigerators, air conditioners, window 
treatments, etc. Now I know where to go to find some industrial trailer 
hitches, I know where there's a natural land formation that looks like a 
face, and I know all about recreational vehicle insurance. But the 
'traveling' articles were also quite fun. I read a column by a fellow 
whose main passion is cruising down the Baja Peninsula solo in his RV. Now 
we're not talking some lame geezer here who wears plaid shorts and 
a flowered Hawaiian shirt, socks with his sandals, and has a camera 
permanently glued to his neck (well, maybe he does, I don't know). We're 
talking about a guy who routinely drives his dual-wheeled vehicle 
off-road into the wilds of Baja, on his own, for weeks at a time. He  
carries tools, spare parts, speaks a little Espanol, knows the wiles of 
the local gangs, the whole nine yards. But the funniest part of the story 
was when he described the grime buildup on his vehicle (the artistic Baja 
dust) and compared it to the clean SUVs that routinely park on his street 
back home. He had some pretty choice comments about the type of folk who 
drive those clean SUVs, what kind of drivers they are, and how they 
probably wouldn't know what "off-road" meant if it walked up and smacked 
them on the head.

Those poor SUV drivers. They catch it coming AND going! 

Deservedly.

Tess

--
to be removed from alfa, see /bin/digest-subs.cgi
or email "unsubscribe alfa" to majordomo@domain.elided