Texas Test Drive

It’s been nearly a week and a half since we arrived in Houston and we are scraping the bottom of our To-Do list: we’ve negotiated the flight, re-set the kids’ body clocks, set Amazon.com alight with electrical purchases and emptied the nearest IKEA warehouse of furnishings and fittings. We staggered from Best Buys (like Dixons, but nicer and staffed by humans) laden with goodies and leaving beautiful, half-believing smiles in our wake. We have filled in registration forms, signed up for TV, dealt with plumbers and, of course, spent three days assembling all the furniture. I even built a castle for the boys out of all the delivery boxes (pictures to follow). We are officially up and running – the household is viable.

But we don’t yet have a car. Well, actually we don’t have two cars. There’s no way round it: Laura needs one to get to work, I need one for school runs. In the UK, where driving is almost always necessary, we were very lucky indeed to be able to walk to work or school. Here, driving seems to be held in the sort of regard that Neil Armstrong might have had for his space suit. Drive-Through ATMs and pharmacies? Is it laziness or convenience? The same could be said of automatic transmission, but on these straight, interminable roads there’s no point in a racing change. There is an illicit thrill to be had in turning right on a red light however.

The Freeway is a different kettle of fish. There are lots of them to begin with: great swooping arches of yellowing-concrete that weave exaggerated curves about each other, dipping and rising like roller-coasters. The M4, it ain’t.

But actually driving on the Freeway is more different again. Firstly, there are no rules. It takes a few minutes to get used to this, but once you do it sort of makes sense as long as you concentrate, have excellent rear-visibility and are very lucky. It’s a free-for-all: five lanes of undertaking, carving-up and near-misses, the only saving grace being that nobody is doing much above 55 miles an hour. The real danger, the unnecessary complication, is that there are exits every half-mile or so and, with no designated over-taking lane, no way of predicting whether you’re supposed to be on the far-left or far-right to make the slip road. The signing of these exits is very, ah, short-termist and it’s not at all uncommon to find oneself having to charge across five lanes of broiling traffic at the last minute. Indicating is for wusses.

My plan is that I will not use the Freeway unless it is a matter of life or death and it is heartening that there is often a largely ignored alternative route. There was one yesterday on the way to the car shop meaning that we didn’t have to traverse The Loop (as the 610, the inner orbital is known). I say car shop, but that doesn’t do justice to CarMax. It looked more like a small airport than a supermarket, with an enormous white building in the middle of a sea of parked cars. The salespeople all wear matching outfits and, once you have done some preliminary searches on the bank of monitors inside, one of them will take you around the lot on a golf cart to review your selections.

Our problem, or rather Timothy’s problem (he being the poor guy lumbered with selling us two cars), was that we didn’t really have any idea what we wanted. We thought we should get a decent family car for me, and some sort of runaround for Laura, but the American market is not really geared up for us. The choice, apart from a smattering of Volkswagens and Volvos, was Japanese or Domestic. “Small” meant 2.4 litre engines and twenty miles to the gallon was considered pretty good. Timothy would show us car after car with increasing exasperation.

“Haven’t you got anything a bit more compact?” we would say.

What the hell is that? A typical American car...

“That is compact!” he’d exclaim, waving his hands at some behemoth or other.

Still, we reached a point where we’d found two cars that might have been a suitable compromise, a Volkswagen Passat and a Dodge Caliber, and I took them both out for a test drive. They were both dull. The Passat was at least good and dull but I felt like I was driving a Werther’s Original. The Caliber had the forced snarling looks of the last batch of MGs but was tinny and unremarkable on the road. So we were back to square one. Another hurdle we just can’t vault is that American cars are extremely ugly and almost totally lacking in charisma. We saw dull sedan after dull sedan and a part of me wanted to cry. The Japanese ones look better, tend to have better fuel-economy and are more reliable, but were still aimed at the same market.

The RAV4. Nice.

At this point, the golf cart was looking like the best option but, in the end, and almost on a whim, I took out a Toyota RAV4. It was about a hundred years old and had more miles on the clock than I’ve had lager beers, but it was roomy, practical and fun to drive. Laura had a turn whilst I babysat the boys in the showroom’s soft play area – she liked it too. Suddenly, it looked like were going to choose a car.

But there’s too much choice. There are four or five branches of CarMax in the metropolitan Houston area alone, and the website (www.carmax.com) allows you to search the nationwide inventory. Within minutes we were looking at the same car – a year newer or a grand cheaper – in Georgia or Maryland. There’s a transfer fee of course but we’re back off to CarMax this afternoon to see if we can’t nail it, in which case some guy is going to be hauling us a RAV4 all the way from Fort Lauderdale or some such – a mere 1,164 miles.

This land may be pleasant, but it sure ain’t green.