Random American iron from the New Hamster trip...
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| The People of Walmart have a '64(?) Oldsmobile F-85 in Upper Cryogenica. |
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| You can tell that you're in Upper Cryogenica because: A) The sportsball sticker on the car is for an ice soccer team, and B) The driver is a Vermont resident who is shopping on the New Hampshire side of the river to avoid the taxes he has voted on his neighbors. |
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| Ooh, Barracuda! The car in the airport this time was a 340 E-body, rather than the rather generic '65 Mustang or vintage Beetle that have greeted me the last couple visits. I approve. |
16 comments:
If you like Mopars, check out (if you haven't already) Graveyard Carz's Facebook feed. Some neat stuff there. For sheer variety, Mopar is hard to beat.
Damn, that takes me back. My mom was an Oldsmobile sort of gal, first one was a '65 F-85, she passed it to her father two years later when she acquired a 98, a coupe. My dad had a 98 sedan, I used to sit on the back seat armrest to get a good view of the countryside. :)
Enjoy the trip, and those old cars are worth damn near their weight in gold, especially in the NE...
Like the plate on the Olds. Very appropriate for Vermont!!
What's with the German flag on the passenger door, I wonder.
That F-85 has to be living in a garage for eight months of the year. Otherwise, it would long ago have rusted away.
Que Ann and Nancy Wilson...
I always liked Cuda's back in the day. Big block motor you did not need to do anything to and still have a flying machine. You could even change plugs on it with half removing the motor.
Course after about 3-4 years of hard driving they went to the junk yard, but they were fun while they lasted.
Wow. I wish I lived where the next "low tax" state was 20 miles away. Being in central Texas, that would be about 400 miles away. But then I wouldn't be in TEXAS. So there.
Fiftycal TX,
NH doesn't have income tax OR sales tax. And you can open carry. And carry switchblades. And it says "LIVE FREE OR DIE" right on the license plates. If it weren't for the snow, I'd be there yesterday.
For its day a cheap high performance muscle car that was popular in my area.
My grandfather's first new car was an Oldsmobile (a '36) and he stuck with them till his last (a '78). I've never owned one, although the local vintage car dealer has what appears to be a pristine '66 Toronado -- very significant car historically, as well as a guarantee you'll never see yourself coming as I do sometimes in a (ahem) '65 Mustang or '96 SS. That Toronado whispers to me every time I pass it by whether in car or on two wheels. I'll probably start seeing it from the air next.
I try to keep to a max of 1 impractical car on the road and 1 in the shop at any given time. The SS is cheating because it's pretty practical.
Re: NH Taxes. There's a few nasty exceptions. A number of years back, Senator Shaheen (she who has introduced a holding envelope for a renewed AWB in the Senate, trying to get into the narrow space to the left of carpetbagging Scott Brown on guns) was Governor Shaheen, and she shepherded through a business tax that also hits sole proprietors, general and limited partners, and any poor bastard that gets paid on a 1099 instead of a W-2. So there's a rather astringent income tax that applies only to the self-employed.
Also, property taxes can be high. They have state, local and schools elements, and the local is set by your town and the schools by your "school administrative district" which may or may not == town. In the cities, the schools spend more money on worse results, partly because of special ed requirements and partly because they're more likely to have dysfunctional administrations and strong unions.
For example, my property taxes are around $6400 a year. If I had the same house in Exeter, which has similar income demographics to my town, I'd be a lot poorer because my taxes would approach $20k (the difference alone would knock a guy out of the Gun of The Month Club™). So people in Exeter are a lot poorer on the same money. This can be pretty shocking for newcomers from the west who pick their dream house before finding out about the uneven tax thing.
People from New York and Mass. move here and celebrate their freedom... and then many of them vote for the same dumb ass policies that created New York and Mass.
I did find the local government/property tax thing pretty fascinating as an outsider. Things were pretty idyllic up Castle Frostbite way, but the way local politics works makes for a state not as "flat" as Indiana in more ways than one.
Marko lives on a dirt road with 100MB/s fiber right to the door, while the next town over (and barely a good rifle shot over, at that) had lots of paved roads... and slow internets. It reminded me in a way of the thousand and one microcosms of Georgia counties, with liquor laws and sales taxes changing every five or ten miles down the road...
Just having moved to Georgia from Missouri a few months ago, I do find the no liquor thing a bit strange. Is there some uniquely Georgian solution I've not discovered yet? And I'm still smarting from the TAVT thing on my bike ($108 compared to $28 the previous year in Misery) Other than that small counties seem a good thing so far. Oh, and supposedly the weather. Maybe next year.
Tom
"Ice soccer"?
"Ice soccer"?
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