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Forum URL: http://www.eyrie-productions.com/Forum/dcboard.cgi
Forum Name: eyrie.private-mail
Topic ID: 728
Message ID: 2
#2, RE: Car Adventures: Crown Vic
Posted by MuninsFire on Apr-14-19 at 02:31 PM
In response to message #0
This reminds me of the '87 Land Yacht that I had for a brief time.

So, around '05, my grandparents' health had declined to the point where they needed someone to help out around the house and assist them with things like the ...what was it, six? medications my grandfather was on for his Parkinson's and the ...many medications my grandmother was on for her Alzheimers-and-other-things. Simplifying the family politics drastically, I was unattached, available, and had no real career prospects to interrupt - so I got shipped out to California to stay with 'em for a few months while arrangements were made to move 'em into an assisted living facility.

(This turned out to be a really excellent personal growth opportunity in a number of ways, but this story's about the car)

One of the duties involved was to drive them to - well, wherever they needed to go. And the vehicle involved was an '87 Cadillac Brougham, in a color that was probably marketed as 'gold' but looked 'beige' to me.

Much like Gryphon's Toronado, it had Power Everything except for the suspension which was some kind of pneumatic thingummy. However, as my prior car experience consisted of a Honda Odyssey and a very small Ford Festiva, I found the 'floatiness' of the vehicle ever so slightly unnerving.

(Also it was -deeply- confusing to me that they'd contrived to put the gas cap behind the rear license plate; the first time I went to fill the thing took me a good several minutes before my grandfather clued me in where to look)

Having learned to drive in Maine, I was familiar with the lack of resolution in steering, braking, acceleration, and sanity you get with driving on snow, and this monstrosity of a vehicle kind of felt like that all the time - the old Festiva I had been driving, even though it was an utter jalopy, had downright crisp steering by comparison with the slightly detached negotiation with which I had to address the navigation of the Yacht. Sure, you could steer it with one finger, but course corrections needed to be considered ahead of time because there just wasn't any kind of feedback to the hands - something which I rely on when driving.

One of the rather...interesting aspects of the vehicle, though, was the aformentioned suspension. See, it was -extremely- cushy and would let you glide along over even rough, badly maintained roads with barely a quiver, which was good for my grandmother sitting in the back seat, who would complain about any significant jarring. Unfortunately, this suspension had a resonant frequency, somehow - a resonant frequency that happened to -exactly- equal the inputs from the dips in the US-101 between Ventura and Santa Barbara when travelling at 75mph, the normal speed-of-traffic in that corridor.

Bottoming out the suspension on such a vehicle is very jarring and disturbing, and my grandmother was displeased when this discovery was made.

There were several interesting stories that arose as a consequence of my driving that vehicle - which, well, was kind of fun, as it turned out; once it got up to speed (which was a very deliberate process, to be sure, given the thing's incredible mass) it would just...go. All day long. And it would behave exactly the same with one person in it as it would with four people and a trunk full of baggage - probably because the vehicle itself outmassed any potential cargo by such a significant factor.

I ended up being given the car due to it not, er, fitting, physically, in the garage of the semi-assisted living community they moved to, and it served me well for a couple of years.

Unfortunately, as seems to be the case with the car stories here, it did come to a tragic end: I was sitting behind an obnoxiously large SUV (a Tahoe, I think?) at a stoplight to turn left, and had some kids in a small sedan behind me; a small car came racing the red light from the opposite direction; and a jeep came out from a side street. Physics occurred, and the small car pushed the Tahoe to sit in my engine compartment, though I only rocked back barely enough to ding the bumper of the kids behind me - for whom it was the driver's first day driving under their own license. And, of course, being a kid with no budget, I didn't have the uninsured motorist coverage on my policy....

(Ended up bicycling to work for some months after that, through necessity, which kinda sucked for various reasons).

Still. I got out of it without more than a bad scare, so the Land Yacht's enormous mass did manage to keep me safe, and that's what really counts in the end, no?

Never did get to take it out to Vegas, though. That run through the high desert would've been fun.