The closing sentence of the My Wheels chapter for my previous practical car spoke of trading the recently battered 2011 Forester. The Subaru had been quite good to me and I’d had every intention of continuing to drive it for several more years. Instead, that battering caused me to move to an updated and differently colored version. Reminiscent of the move that replaced the red 1998 Corvette with a blue 2006 model, the red 2011 Forester was replaced with a blue 2018. However, not only is a 4-door SUV quite unlike a 2-door sports car, the two blues are worlds apart. The Corvette’s Daytona Blue was kind of exciting. The Forester’s Quartz Blue Pearl is kind of boring.
My first documented trip in the 2011 Subaru included a stop in Columbus, Ohio, where I had the clever (to me) idea of photographing the car under a Denny’s sign. So naturally (to me) I thought I should do the same thing with the 2018 car. That turned out to be much easier said than done. It seems the Denny’s restaurant chain has fallen on hard times and reduced their presence considerably. There are none left near Cincinnati and only one in Columbus and it lacks the big elevated sign I sought. The picture above was taken at a restaurant near Terre Haute, Indiana. Unlike the similar shot of the red Forester, it was not taken on the car’s first trip but on its second most recent, number eleven.
The red Subaru made its first documented trip just about a week after acquisition. The blue one was in my position for over four months before it was so honored and it would be another four months before it actually appeared in a trip journal. It was the middle of July 2017 when I stopped at the dealer with the scrunched and scratched red Forester thinking it might be close enough to the end of the model year to find a bargain. To my surprise, there wasn’t a single 2017 Forester left on the lot and only a few of other models. I didn’t get the close-out deal I’d hoped for but I did get a deal that was reasonable and put me in a 2018 vehicle when 2017 was barely half over.
I believe the new car stood at approximately the same point in Forester model ranking as the previous one had but it had seven years worth of new bells and whistles. Some, like the rearview camera and adaptive cruise control, I appreciated almost immediately, and it took just one road-crossing deer to convince me that the pre-collision braking was a good thing. The lane departure warning eventually won me over but I’m still not a fan of Lane Keep Assist which tries to keep you from departing a lane without signaling. Fortunately, in my opinion, this latter feature defaults off.
My first trip after the swap was with an uncle and cousin and used the cousin’s Cadillac. The next trip journal involved the Society for Commercial Archeology in Cincinnati where most of the miles were covered in a tour bus. Then there was a trip in the Miata before the Subaru was put to use on a Thanksgiving trip to Tennessee. It also carried me on a Christmas trip that reached into Georgia and an early April trip to Pittsburgh, PA. It served to mark the “Prev” and “Next” links on the daily pages for those three trips but was otherwise out of sight. It finally broke cover on the late April end-to-end drive of the Jefferson Highway. There was a shot of it all clean and shiny at a car wash in Winnepeg, Canada, then the shot at left of the still clean car about to start down the first of many unpaved sections of the JH. A similar view of the car was incorporated into the cover of a book resulting from that trip, Jefferson Highway All the Way.
With the exception of a fly and drive trip that involved a rental car, The Forester has handled every trip since that 2017 Thanksgiving outing. It hasn’t appeared in a lot of pictures, though, and I suspect it has something to do with that “kind of boring” Quartz Blue Pearl paint. On the 2018 Christmas trip, I caught it in a nighttime shot at South 21 Drive In in Charlotte, NC. In April, it posed in Kentucky at the Cave City Motel as I headed to the Jefferson Highway Conference in Natchitoches, LA.
In June of 2019, on my way to the Lincoln Highway Association conference in Wyoming, I stopped by one of my favorite gas stations in Grand Island, NE. This was my first time at Kensinger Service since the 2016 passing of long-time owner Dick Grudzinski. I missed out on what is still a full-service operation by arriving after the day’s closing. That’s just one of the reasons this is not my favorite picture of the station. It might, however, be my favorite picture of the car.
To date, the blue Subby has carried me on an even dozen documented road trips and, as a very active member of my current two-car fleet, I expect it to carry me on many more. That’s assuming, of course, that I can avoid being stopped at the wrong light at the wrong time.
My Previous Wheels: Chapter 38 — 2003 Mazda Miata
My Next Wheels: Chapter 40 — 1997 Schwinn
Trips, days on the road, and pictures posted are all down and I believe it can all be blamed on that July through September gap when a variety of life’s activities kept me off the road and close to home. The slight uptick in blog posts comes from me doing a couple more reviews this year than last. Two of those new-for-2019 blog posts join three oldies in the top five list. For the second year in a row, all of the top five trip journal entries were for major trips which is the way I always thought it should be. One was even a 2019 outing.
There are things that fans of old roads or of transportation history in general falsely assume that everyone knows about. One such item is the continent crossing Motor Transport Corps convoy of 1919. In the summer following the end of the first World War, a group of military personnel and vehicles set off from Washington, DC, to test the nation’s roads all the way to San Francisco. Although he was primarily an observer on the trip, his future accomplishments make Dwight Eisenhower the member of the convoy best-known today. Michael Owen uses the future president’s nickname in naming this telling of his own retracing of the 3,250-mile-long path that some 300 men and 81 vehicles of all shapes and sizes followed a century ago.
US-36 is kind of special to me. It is one of just a handful of US highways with an endpoint in my home state and one of just two that pass through my birth county. It’s even more special to Allan Ferguson. He grew up near the route in Illinois, has ancestral connections to the eastern end in Ohio, and currently lives near its western end in Colorado. It has had a role in much of his life from childhood vacations and visits to relatives to business trips and drives between old and new homes as an adult. Not all of his travels between Colorado and Illinois have been on Route 36. Not surprisingly, his early trips back home were on expressways. At some point, he tried US-36 and came to realize three things. The first was that it took no more time than driving the interstates. Between Denver and central Illinois, the US-36 is quite straight and about 100 miles shorter than either I-70 or I-80. Secondly, it was relaxing rather than stressful. The third thing he realized was that the drive was actually interesting and that realization eventually led to this book.