“With all the bragging people do nowadays about gas mileage, I do what others do to guarantee great mileage.”<\/p>\n
And what is that?<\/p>\n
“I lie about it.” Sometimes I claim fantastic automotive efficiency, when in reality, the kind of mileage I usually get can be measured in gallons per mile.<\/p>\n
We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve known people who couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stand for anyone to be one up. And our enjoyment comes in planting a mythical number or amount and watching someone try to top it.<\/p>\n
The first person is at an obvious disadvantage because all the second person needs to do is raise the figure.<\/p>\n
For example, years back, my neighbor in Cuba, N.M., had just bought a new \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc72 AMC Gremlin, like ours. He asked what kind of mileage I got. “About 24 miles a gallon.”<\/p>\n
“Well, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nothing. I get 27,” the new car owner said. He had to keep it believable; if he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d gone much higher, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have eventually explained that every two days he needed to drain a gallon or two from the tank, as the car refined its own gas, the way wind-powered generators create electricity.<\/p>\n
To match my neighbor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s braggadocio, I would have needed to say, “Did I say 24 mph? Actually, I meant to say 34.” And so the bidding begins.<\/p>\n
An experience Friday put me back into that my-cat-can-beat-your-cat mindset. A trip to Santa Fe to hear a speech by Barack Obama created some interesting figures. Now, if the digits 4 and 0 referred to mpg, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be calling my old friend and asking how much mileage his car gets. But these digits refer to miles (or smaller units) per hour, not gallon.<\/p>\n
Once we hit Rodeo Road, on our way to Santa Fe Community College, where the Democratic presidential candidate was to speak at about 6:45 p.m., we joined the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s largest parking lot. Equipped with press passes, we assumed arriving at 5 p.m. would give us time to choose the best seats.<\/p>\n
Even a few miles from Witter Gymnasium, traffic crawled. Non-Capital Citians need to realize that there are driving rules for everyone else, ourselves included, but being a resident of Santa Fe absolves you from rules. Therefore, even after waiting through 12 light changes, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d better not block the intersection, unless you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re a native. On four-lane Rodeo Road, it was our turn to cross, but two young women muscled their SUVs into the stream of traffic, just daring us to do something about it. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been blocking the intersection. They had established equity in their piece of tarmac. I got honked at for remaining stationary because none of the cars ahead of me were moving. Yet, without compunction, others moved and stopped whenever they wanted.<\/p>\n
At 5:07, I reset the trip odometer as we participated in this Santa Fe auto snake dance. Forty minutes later, at 5:47, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d traveled not 40 miles, not 4.0 miles, but .4 of a mile, a distance I can walk in eight minutes.<\/p>\n
Some pedestrians made much better progress. Getting to the college from our position on Rodeo Road would require a left turn about a mile from where we were stalled. We noticed drivers in the right lane passing motorists like me, and hoping to be let in at the head of the line.<\/p>\n
We watched as a woman in a Hummer navigated her vehicle over the lane divider and headed back. We saw cars turning left at a street well before Richards Avenue, and we wondered whether they knew a shortcut \u00e2\u20ac\u201d or were creating one.<\/p>\n
I thought, Why should we sit here, with rapidly expanding bladders? By the time we reached the Richards Avenue turnoff, we were turned off. It was 6 p.m. I was tempted to roll down my window and tell a fellow motorist I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been stuck in traffic more than an hour. But no matter what I said, the temptation would be for him to say, “That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nothing. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been here all day.”<\/p>\n
Gridlock had formed on two-lane Richards, whereupon Optic managing editor David Giuliani and reporter Don Pace, who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d driven behind us, became pedestrians. David\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s wife dropped them off, in 30-degree temperatures, so they could hoof it, and not surprisingly, they arrived before many of the drivers.<\/p>\n
Was the 2-mile-plus hike worth it? Well, none of us members of the Optic staff ever made it into the gym. It turns out the free tickets distributed around town and elsewhere greatly exceeded the capacity of the 3,600-seat gymnasium. Like the practice of overbooking flights, the organizers of the Obama event didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to take a chance of having an empty gym.<\/p>\n
“Some people get tickets but never use them, so we played it safe by issuing a few extras,” one of the organizers told me. We relished the opportunity to use press passes, which would entitle us to be pushed around and bullied by the national press corps. But for what?<\/p>\n
Newspapers Saturday morning reported that some people showed up as early as 11 a.m., almost eight hours before the speech. We believed simply arriving by 5 p.m. would assure us seats close up.<\/p>\n
The Santa Fe fire marshall had other ideas.<\/p>\n
Some faithful fans, caught between Barack and a hard place, got to hear him as he spoke briefly into a microphone, apologizing to the hundreds who never got to enter the gym.<\/p>\n
The ill-fated Barack experience taught us several things:<\/p>\n
Every Santa Fe driver has a sensor built into the car which tells the driver which cars are from Vegas and therefore can be ignored, pushed aside or honked at.<\/p>\n
We learned that driving slower increases fuel efficiency, but not when you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re going 3,000 feet an hour, slower than people walk.<\/p>\n
Had we not been shut out, there would have been coverage of Obama\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s speech in Monday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Optic.<\/p>\n
Well, that didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t happen this time, at least not like the time back in 2004, when thousands of us got up close to candidates John Kerry and John Edwards when they arrived by train.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the next time an influential candidates graces us with his or her presence, and there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a chance for real media coverage, somebody please remind me that we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re supposed to arrive eight hours early.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“With all the bragging people do nowadays about gas mileage, I do what others do to guarantee great mileage.” And what is that? “I lie about it.” Sometimes I claim fantastic automotive efficiency, when in reality, the kind of mileage I usually get can be measured in gallons per mile. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve known people who couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}