One day, I will find a clean early Golf GTI. Surely there’s still one out there, somewhere.
That’ll be a good day.
(Source: blaaargh)
Don’t think that’s gonna fit on my desk.
(via bzr)
Just found out I might have a bit of Martin’s Graduating College So Here’s A Car money that I never knew about and apparently my parents forgot about coming to me from a secret bank account that’s been chilling since I was a baby or something.
This is bad.
I’m way too seriously considering flying across the country for any one of several old British or German sports cars. I need someone to talk me out of this.
I really want an old Mini. The idea of zipping through and around traffic in a car that I’m probably too tall for and would basically be wearing like a jacket really appeals to me. I feel like a late one with fuel injection is probably the best of several worst-case scenarios which also include a MG B-GT, Triumph GT6, (both of which are probably horrible ideas) BMW 2002, and as-early-as-I-can-find Volkswagen Golf GTi (though the GTi is lowest on the list right now).
The last thing I want is something boring. If you can talk me out of one of these and into something less likely to die for no apparent reason on the side of the road, but no less cool-looking or interesting, I invite you to do so.
It’s gonna be a couple of months before any real progress is made as far as a purchasing decision, but I feel like if we can nip this one in the bud, everyone’s gonna be better off.
I’m personally more likely to drive a hybrid vehicle that makes me feel slightly like Boba Fett than slightly like Jensen Button.
I would be so happy if I had a couple-decades-old Golf GTi that was a little beat up, but loved. I wouldn’t feel bad about driving it every day, and parking it on the street, or getting it wet in the rain, or any number of other things. But it would be small, light, quick, and easily fixable, just like any number of spacecraft from Star Wars.
At one time, this was in the running for a first-car purchase. I’m sad it never happened.
(Source: bzr)
"
You can tell the economic story of New York’s Catskill Mountains region over the last century through the patch of land my maternal grandfather grew up on. Max and Minnie Lebowitz, my great-grandparents, who immigrated from Hungary, moved up to the country to escape the Lower East Side’s infamously crowded conditions and grind out a meager existence on a 62-acre farm. The sparsely populated village of Fallsburg, N.Y., where my grandfather was raised, was storybook-typical: a one-room schoolhouse that you had to walk miles in the snow to attend and a local sheriff who looked the other way as local preteens illegally drove cars to get to the faraway high school and drove tractors on their parents’ land.
Over time, the farm, which had begun taking in summertime boarders escaping New York City’s oppressive humidity, morphed into the Lebowitz Pine View, one of the hotel resorts of the famed “Borscht Belt”—so named for the density of observant Eastern European Jewish enclaves. Tennis courts and a swimming pool were constructed, my grandfather returned every summer to run the kitchen, and my mother and her cousins reminisce fondly about stirring up trouble there.
But by the 1970s the resorts were falling on hard times. Cheap travel opened up more exotic destinations, air conditioning allowed people to stay in the city, and women entering the workplace shortened summer vacations. Upstate New York was left with dim economic prospects, except for one thing: prisons. As urban crime escalated, politicians and judges responded with longer prison sentences, and New York City was generating more prisoners every year but had no space to house them. New York state’s prison population has spiraled upwards from less than 13,000 in 1970 to more than 70,000 today. So in 1983, the state took over my family’s property and shuttered the resort to build access roads to Sullivan Correctional Facility, a maximum-security addition to neighboring Woodbourne Correctional.
"—
From Ben Adler’s really nice story of the evolution of his family farm into a state prison. (via newsweek)
Hey Newsweek- I can relate to this one. My family used to own a different hotel & resort in the Catskills in the middle of the last century. Apparently it was quite the place to be if you were a middle-class Jewish family back then. Now, it survives as a number of rotting, decrepit buildings and Grossinger’s Golf Course.
VW brochures were always so classy…
It seems like a First Car is actually sort of becoming a real possibility for me this summer. We’ve got my grandparents’ Hyundai sitting in the driveway back home, and my parents offered it to me to use this summer. And I was totally ok with that, because just having a car of my own would be totally cool and unusual for me. But as of about a week or two ago I was talking to Dad and he suggested that while any car is cool, the Hyundai is lacking in actual cool. He suggested, completely on his own, that perhaps the Hyundai could be foisted upon some unsuspecting boring person, and the cash put towards something with balls.
I immediately thought of the MGB-GT or Triumph GT-6 or old Mini that I’ve been dreaming about for years, but then he reminded me that I’d actually have to get places… And not just sit in the driveway in a puddle of oil making engine noises.
That said, if anyone has any leads on an early Golf GTi or something else smallish, reasonably quick, cheap, and full of character, I’d be glad to entertain suggestions.
