Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Bucket List: A list of things to do before you die. Derived from the term “kicking the bucket.”
If you didn’t already know it by now, I love cars. I love driving them, reading about them, photographing them, the whole megillah. I am car crazy. So you may ask, how is that possible when I haven’t owned a car of my own in more than three years? The answer has to do with money but let me tell you a story first…
When I lived in Baltimore I had a friend John who was an architect and an avid Volkswagen enthusiast. This was back in the day and he drove a VW Beetle, a real air-cooled one not the new front-drive model that came along later (Like Mary owns.) He always wanted to own a Porsche but could never justify the price tag, which at the time seemed high but in retrospect, maybe not so much. My friend also liked motorsports and enjoyed attending races at Watkins Glen International in New York state. One year he was driving back from watching the US Grand Prix that was held at the track through 1980 and on the way home, he stopped to visit his friend Bill who lived in Pennsylvania. He had a nice visit full of nostalgia and was glad he took the time to make the detour. After John arrived back home in Baltimore, he received a phone call from Bill’s wife. It seems that shortly after he left, Bill had a heart attack and died. The next day, John bought a Porsche.
Above image: Vetatur Fumare [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)]
We all get so busy with our jobs and lives, putting out the daily “fires” we have to deal with and often lose sight of the fact, that as Jim Morrison once remarked, “we’re not getting out of this alive.” The Bucket List concept was not one I was initially familiar with but I had an informal list and think maybe it’s something we should should, at least, keep in the back of our minds because ‘ya never know…
At a recent Cars & Coffee car show, I saw a matte silver-finished Mercedes-Benz AMG G 63 4MATIC for sale from Mercedes Benz of Littleton. It was a CPO car with a price tag of $109,799 and had a luxurious grey leather interior and only 20,734 miles on the odometer. A G-wagen used to be a bucket list car for me but as I nudge ever closer to the bucket, it’s not so much any more. Is a Kirkham Motorsports roadster like the one I photographed at SEMA a few years ago on my bucket list? I came up with the same answer as the G-wagen— not at this time.
And then I saw Doug DeMuro’s YouTube video entitled The Bentley Arnage Is the Ultimate $30,000 Luxury Car and realized this is it! This is the car for me. But I also quickly realized I couldn’t afford even an “affordable” Bentley, let alone an oil change for one. Yet it seems like the perfect car for me at this time of my life. A boy can dream can’t he?
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