Saturday, August 08, 2009

Today's Off Road Adventure

I live in the Phoenix area. Most of us live in the flat lands of the city. There are some "mountains" that, if you can afford a couple million dollars for a driveway, you can build a house on. But among the flatlanders, one thing you see a lot of is four wheel drive "off road vehicles". You see stuff like this on the freeways that have probably climbed nothing higher than a speed bump in an auto parts parking lot...
And then we have the "partway up the hill" noeveau riche who need something a little more powerful and roomy than a Porche Carerra to get them up the driveway with the kiddo, two bags of groceries, a soccer ball and the dry cleaning in the car. So we see quite a few of these...
Personally, I feel very safe around here because if we are ever invaded by a foreign enemy the government will have enough Hummers to conscript into service to hand one to every member of the Armed Forces.

But, there are a lot of people who drive "normal" offroad SUV's. Most of these folks will probably never climb anything higher than the curb into their driveway or through anything deeper than the puddle at the curb from the lawn sprinkler. One of my clients has a Range Rover. You can actually drive a Range Rover off road through stuff like this...
or climb stuff like this...
But if you live in the city and plan to take a short trip off the street in your neighborhood in one...

Don't drive in your kitchen.

Yep. I spent today reframing and closing off a hole where a customer drove through the garage wall it into her kitchen. She kept coming in saying, "Is it bad?... How bad is it?" I told her it was not a big deal, we take out walls and put them back all the time, she just did the bulk of the demolition for us with her car. I don't think the "range" in "Range Rover" refers to the kitchen stove.

6 comments:

Ashley Siferd said...

This is great. I see a lot of Hummers and big Jeep set-ups around the mountains in Tennessee, but I've only ever seen them on the interstate...never off road.

Unknown said...

Woohoo!

Jessie said...

Awesome!!!! but you forgot about those stretch hummers (you know so you can take your prom date and about 30 friends off roading on prom night and then you can camp!!)

Elizabeth @ The Garden Window said...

Did the lady who drove into her kitchen have an automatic gearbox or a stick-shift ?
She won't forget that kitchen re-modelling in a hurry !

Steve Robinson said...

Hi Elizabeth, It was automatic, but she said the "computer" did something and the engine just took off when she was pulling into the garage. You'd have to get a good "running start" at the wall to do that kind of damage. It was an impressive hole in the wall, for sure. I think she was more upset about the bottles of good wine in the wine rack that was on the kitchen side that got demolished than anything else.

Janelle thegeekywife said...

pssstttt...I know of an Orthodox priest who has a hummer and for the life of me I can't figure out WHY. (or HOW, but maybe there's a trust fund involved.)