Between A Rock And A Hard Place
This past weekend I had the pleasure of taking two pretty cool dudes around the roads we used for this year's Road&Track Performance Car Of The Year Presented By John Lobb, Bootmaker. Okay, I made that last part up. Today, I stumbled into what I like to think of as an "opportunity".
My friend Chris from Toronto finally made it down for a weekend of discussing guitars and vinyl records and the undeniable brilliance of Yacht Rock. I've stayed at Chris's place a few times during my Canadian misadventures and it was great to be able to return the favor. He's an R&T reader so I took him around the Hocking Hills locations for PCOTY including the super-secret double-black-diamond-difficulty road that Car and Driver and Automobile never found during their years down there. We used my trusty Accord which as always is a bit short on thermal capacity in the brake system. Given that I had my son with me, however, and that we were consequently dialing it back quite a bit, the Honda was up to the task.
My intrepid son continues to take entire years off my life with his casual approach to climbing rocks and approaching cliff faces and whatnot. In the above photos, you can see him taking an eight-inch-wide exit gap at the Rock House. I really sweated that one but he was eager to try it.
The video that we all made on Saturday night has already been posted. In my defense, I have to say that I'm coming down with a cold and I'm losing my voice or something. The next morning, with John safely tucked away at his mother's house, we "dimed" my Marshall Bluesbreaker and terrorized the neighborhood with a couple of Zep tunes. That is one loud amp, but when it's cranked up you can see that it's worth every penny.
Today was a difficult day; someone I know lost someone she loved dearly and I found out that I'm going to need to get a real job some time in the near future lest I run out of money for Marshall Bluesbreakers and, er, food. One of my personal contracting clients came up with a pretty bizarre and frustrating problem that kept me up until about ten minutes ago working on a low-cost solution. I did nothing but fight and squabble with people from about 3PM forward. The cranked-up optimism of Sunday afternoon seems pretty far away. But that's how it goes. Light and shade, just like Mr. Page said.