Adventures in the Outback

It's not actually the inner Oz I'm talking about here, but the wagon of the same name produced by Subaru. On my recent visit to Montana, my rental car turned out to be a Subaru Outback, which was good, because I had been intending to test drive one.

It wasn't until I attempted to find my car in a restaurant parking lot that I made a curious discovery while walking down a row of silver Outbacks looking for mine. The Outback is the National Car of Montana, or at any rate, Kalispell, Montana - or at least the Toyota Camry of Kalispell. Every other vehicle seems to be an outback. The whole vibe was redolent of Drowning Mona.

The Outback, I hear, has a very good reputation in snow. There wasn't any snow where I was driving (Logan Pass is apparently still closed due to the depth of the remaining snow), but it seemed like a pretty good car anyway.

Except for the fact that I needed contortionist skill to actually enter it. If I put my foot in first, there was no way to get my thigh past the steering wheel, depite several degrees of freedom in that steering wheel. Backing in was the only option.

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