Could be any or all of the above, plus camel, foot, or snowmobile — depending on the country, of course.
I can’t say how I’d take a cross-country trip without knowing which country it is that I’m crossing. Vatican City frowns on you driving a bus through it, Russia is too long to do entirely on cross-country skis, and one can’t transit Bolivia in a ferry.
The one I think about most lately was around Cao Bang District (Vietnam) on a scooter, but maybe because it hasn’t been so long ago.
Shopping for crazy. I’ve become aware that – during some time periods, it’s mandated that there be one bat-shit insane person per subway car — and that, if there are more than that, they need to spread out evenly and give the stage to one among them — a Car Crazy Champion, if you will. After riding in a car with a urine-drenched crack addict who paced the length of the car eating (and sloshing) some pungent food from a Styrofoam container, I realized I should have been in the next car with the very nicely dressed and clean-cut man in what seemed to be a self-created and self-imposed uniform reading aloud from the Bible. I no longer concern myself with what car gets me closest to the appropriate exit, rather I shop around for the least objectionable crazy.
Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.
Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And there is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone for ever!
What is your all time favorite automobile?
Of the ones I’ve owned, probably the first new car I bought with my own money. It was a 1990 Nissan Sentra, a horrible car — boxy ugly and did not age well (died miserably.) But I paid it off and owned it outright (long before said miserable death.) That said, my sense of sentimentality is not so strong that I can’t admit that it was a shitty car, and I probably made many rookie mistakes in purchasing it. I later owned a Toyota that was a much better car — also looked more like a car than the crate one comes in.
As for cars overall, something affordable, quiet, reasonably comfortable on a long haul, but cheap to fuel. I’m even less a fetishist than a sentimentalist.
a family lies
on cardboard mattresses
to keep bone from stone.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 