Ferrari Mailing List: (OT) - Jeremy Clarkson - hilarious column about Canada, Car rentals and, oh yeah, the Dodge Grand Caravan

[Dennis Liu (bigheaddennis]

Dodge Grand Caravan 
Clarkson went on holiday to Ottawa, hired a dodgy Dodge and 'hosed the
Garden of Eden down with 600 gallons of adrenaline'

Jeremy Clarkson 


Whenever there?s a global survey to find the best places in the world to
live, Canada always does well. 

We?re told that no one in Canada is ever robbed, butchered, stabbed,
murdered or blown up by a doctor. And I don?t doubt that all of this is
true. 

But by the same token no one in Canada ever wins on the horses, or escapes
from a knife fight with their life, or has an orgasm. It is Switzerland with
wheat. 

They try to tell us that it?s a wilderness full of bears who?ll kill you if
you run away or stand still ? I can never remember which. But do you know
how many people in the whole of the vastness of Canada have been killed by
bears in the past two years? 

It?s one. Honestly, more people than that are killed in Britain by their
trousers. 

Anyway, Ottawa is the capital and it?s really lovely. Lovely, lovely,
lovely. More lovely than a pressed wild flower in a copy of Jane Eyre. If it
were a person, it would be Jenny Agutter in The Railway Children. If it were
an animal it would be a fluffy rabbit. And no one would ever eat it and it
would never catch myxomatosis. 

Strangely, however, despite the complete lack of pressure, and the plentiful
supply of cheap parking, what the people of Ottawa do come the weekend is
drive half an hour to their cabins by the lake. The lake is (gravelly voice
here) really lovely. Take your breath away, roll your eyes,
God-I-have-got-to-dive-in-that-right-now gorgeous. 

I spent some of my holiday there this summer, and it was like lying in a
nest of cotton wool, being hypnotised by a tin of treacle. I liked to swim
in the morning, when the mist was rising, and in the afternoon I?d go
kayaking for hours round all the islands and through the forests,
soundlessly, apart from the paddles making eddies in the water. And the
occasional satisfying crack as the beavers gnawed their way through another
pine. 

At night I?d lie in bed listening to the loons, those beautiful diving
birds, and the gentle slop of the calm waters lapping against the untouched
shoreline. And I couldn?t help thinking: what I need to make this the best
place on earth is a speedboat . . . 

Happily, my host had such a thing tucked away in his boathouse, and so for
the next few days I never heard a loon, or a beaver, or the gentle slop of
the wavelets. Instead it was wall to wall grrrrrrrrrrrr from a 70 horsepower
Johnson outboard, and the excited shrieks from all the children who were
being towed behind on big inflatable rubber rings. 

I don?t think the locals liked it very much. Canadians reckon the speedboat
sits on the scale of antisocial behaviour between heroin and rape, and they
plainly thought that we might have been emissaries from Satan. Certainly,
they watched us in the same way that an Amish village would watch a
performance by Babyshambles. 

But the fact of the matter is this. God had done well with his side of the
deal. The sky was blue, the sun was warm and the views were postcard-plus
exceptional. But we had completed the picture with two cubic feet of
internal combustion. We had hosed the Garden of Eden down with 600 gallons
of adrenaline and turned it into paradise. 

It?s lovely, as I said, to drift aimlessly through the forests on a canoe.
But it?s so much better to be hurled through them at 40mph on a big, bouncy
and almost completely uncontrollable inner tube. 

What?s more. Falling off a canoe is a bloody nuisance, chiefly because you
cannot get back on again. Whereas falling from a hurtling piece of plastic
is just about the biggest laugh a man can have. Especially if you go in
upside down and your shorts come off. 

I would recommend a holiday on a Canadian lake to anyone. But I?m afraid the
recommendation comes with a bit of a proviso. To get from where the
aeroplane lands to where the lake is you will need to drive. And that means
you will need to borrow a car from a manufacturer?s press fleet. 

But since you can?t do that, I didn?t either. I hired one from a company
called Thrifty. I looked for one called Extravagant. Or Expensive. But no
such thing existed, so Thrifty it was. 

The girl on the desk took my details, and as is the way with all hire-car
companies, began to enter the full name of every single company on the
Footsie 100 into her computer. Finally, after about a year, she looked up
and cheerily announced that no cars were available. 

I explained that we had made a reservation and that we had three small
children who had just emerged from seven hours in the care of Air Canada -
which is a bit like spending seven hours in a sensory deprivation tank - and
that we needed some wheels. 

This made her smile: a big, toothy, well-there?s-nothing-I-can-do about-it
smile. Big mistake. My children saw what was coming and ran for their lives.
My wife went the colour of a tomato and shrank into her own handbag. 

When I?m faced with intransigence at a car-rental desk, what I like to do is
summon up some little nugget of military history. It?s never difficult. In
Germany I tell them about Dresden, in France it?s Agincourt, in Spain I wax
lyrical about Drake, in Italy I?m spoilt for choice, and in Argentina, where
I?m going next year, I shall be mentioning Goose Green. 

In Canada I told the smiling girl at the Thrifty desk all about the massive
superiority of General Wolfe over the pitiable Marquis de Montcalm and
explained that if she didn?t come up with a car - right now - I?d visit the
Plains of Abraham on her desk. 

It worked, and 10 minutes later I was driving through Canada . . . in a
Dodge Grand Caravan . . . from a company called Thrifty. As recipes go, this
is right up there with a plate of pork sausages and strawberry ice cream
served in a puddle of tepid Greek urine. 

According to the bumf, this year?s Grand Caravan comes with the Swivel-N-Go
system, which means the two middle seats rotate to face backwards, as well
as the Stow-N-Go setup, which means you can stow the back seats away . . .
and then, er, go somewhere else. 

On top of this, it comes with a stowable table, a MyGIG infotainment radio
with AM/FM/CD/ DVD/MP3 as well as a 20GB HDD, touchscreen, a USB input, GPS
navigation, second and third-row 8in video screens, Sirius Satellite
Backseat TV offering Cartoon Network Mobile, Nickelodeon and the Disney
Channel, LED interior lighting, a ParkView reversing camera, a nine-speaker
Infinity sound system with a 506 watt amplifier, 13 cupholders, and
sunshades for the second and third-row windows. 

Sadly, my car appeared to have none of these things. 

What it did have was a nasty scrape along its flanks and a steering wheel
that was not on straight. I think. It?s hard to be sure, because where I
pointed it seemed to have little or no bearing on my direction of travel.
Small wonder that the Caravan?s sister car, the Chrysler Grand Voyager, did
so badly in the Euro NCAP safety tests. 

Happily, however, if you do crash you won?t be going very fast. Apparently
this car is available with a choice of three engines ? a 3.3 V6, a 3.8 V6
and a 4.0 V6. I think mine, in the best traditions of multiple choice, had
d) none of the above. 

I don?t want to be stupid and say it was powered by something you might find
in a cement mixer, but that?s how it felt. Really. It had no power at all,
and if you dared to floor it to, say, get up a small hill, the gearbox would
swap cogs with a force capable of beheading everyone inside. 

I think I?d been given this car because the girl at the desk had tried to
outwit me, in the same way that Montcalm tried to outwit Wolfe. Happily,
however, we won - again - because just five minutes before we handed it back
my youngest daughter did the decent thing. And vomited in it. 

Before I went away, I wrote a review of the glorious Mercedes-Benz CL 600 in
which I said the suspension was not quite right. Well, Mercedes has sent
another one round and I?m delighted to say it feels fine. 

But I?m not sure about the shape of the speedometer. So I might hang on to
it for a few more weeks, just to be sure . . . 

Vital statistics 

Model Dodge Grand Caravan 

Engine 3301cc, six cylinders 

Power 170bhp @ 5000rpm 

Torque 200 lb ft @ 4000rpm 

Transmission Four-speed automatic 

Fuel 22.2mpg (combined cycle) 

1997mm CO2 n/a 

Acceleration 0-62mph: 11.8sec 

Top speed 111mph 

Price $21,970 (£10,946) 

Rating 

Verdict I?d rather have a speedboat