#DreamCar

Your humble author is about to put Los Angeles in the rearview mirror, but before I do, I wanted to leave you with one last news nugget.

It involves … Barbie.

My cruise was set at 68 mph. For my very last drive in my Boss 302, not only was I driving on a relatively straight and flatter-than-Taylor-Swift interstate, I wasn’t even doing the posted speed limit. It was a stark contrast to the way I had spent the previous forty-two months in the Recaro driver’s seat of what was likely the best pony car that had ever been built on the day it rolled off of the assembly line in Flat Rock.

For forty-two months, every time that I made the 90-degree left turn out of my failed, half-empty subdivision onto the curvaceous country road that intersected the neighborhood’s exit, I did it in a full drift, burning up the excessively overpriced tires with banshee-like screams that acted as a rubber alarm clock for the entire street’s residents.

For forty-two months, I revved the Boss’ motor all the way to its previously unheard of 7,500 rpm redline with every launch, creating a soundtrack that was equal parts Beethoven and Stravinsky in its cacophonous composition.

For forty-two months, the speedometer’s needle rarely saw the left side of 85, and set up a near permanent residence to the right of a hundred any time that the Boss’ retro-inspired nose had an open road in front of it.

But not on its last day.