Ghost Girl

We needed a car for the trip, and this is the one we chose. It's a Honda Element, introduced in 2003. It is the only car designed for the kind of thing we are trying to do. All other SUV are designed for people to haul golf clubs or get their kids to soccer practice while parting with a great deal of money at the same time. The Element is designed as a "mobile base camp" according Honda. It isn't very expensive, and it is amazingly practical.

She is named Ghost Girl because Lori became convinced that it was female (don't ask me) and our friend Theresa described it as "quiet as a ghost."

The rest of this page will sound like a Honda ad. I don't care. This car is so cool, it deserves the exposure. Almost every time we drive it, we get comments and questions from other drivers or pedestrians, overwhelmingly positive.

A toll booth attendent in New York said, "It's a Honda Hummer. I love it."

"I gotta get one," said a man behind the wheel of a Land Rover.

Take a look at these bay doors. Loading and unloading is so easy.	Here's a view from the rear. Again, the doors open very wide. The tailgate is flat, unlike most hatchbacks, and it can support 200kgs (or about 450 lbs.) That makes for a good ad hoc picnic table, among other things.


This is one of the greatest innnovations. The rearseats fold up against the sides of the car, so they aren't wasting space. No other SUV has something like this.	Here's another innovation. Front and rear seats fold down to create one long bed.

A practical dashboard with lots of nooks. It's also fairly flat, so if you have to put your coffee mug up there for a moment, it's not going to slide off in your lap.	This this the floor. Notice no carpet. This is so cool. If you don't know why this is cool, then you've never tracked cave mud through your car. Now, if you are the type who is fastidious about the carpeting in the car, don't get an Element. Get a Lincoln Navigator or one of those Mercedes things, some other fake SUV. The Element is for people who do interesting things, and you can't stay clean doing interesting things.

What else?

Real-time four-wheel drive, meaning the 4WD kicks in as soon as the front wheels start loosing traction.
Two sockets for 12 watt electical converters. You can recharge your laptop or cellphone or whatever. Now,most cars have the socket in the front (the cigarette lighter), but how many have one in the back as well?
Because the front end is so short, the car has an amazingly tight turn radius.

What's not cool?

There's not a lot of power. It isn't sluggish, but if you've test-driven one of those 8-cylinder jobs, you may be a little disappointed. But it can still accelerate up a steep incline while loaded down, so it's not doing to badly.
It draws a lot of attention to itself. Everywhere we go, people stop us and want to talk about it and look inside. Whether this is an advantage or a disadvantage depends on how busy you are at the moment.
It's not very sexy. If you're looking for a car to impress members of the opposite sex, look elsewhere. However, if you're confident in your own sex appeal, the Element is much more amenable to actual sex than any sports car.
The goofy-looking teenagers with their ballcaps on sideways don't like it all. (See above entry).