(For the record, it’s located off of Rittiman Road just west of Loop 410.)

It is a neighborhood where all the streets are lovingly named after failed and/or obscure European automobiles.  And not your Ferraris or Mercedes, we’re talking the Hillman, the Austin Allegro, the Renault Dauphine, Alfa Romeo, and Fiat.

Heeeeere’s Fiat!  They improved the warranty because they had to.

At least this Austin Allegro didn’t have the quartic (read: square) steering wheel that came standard in the UK.

Alfa’s weren’t all that obscure, being favored by the quirky, swinging, polygamist, condo-dwelling middle-aged people who usually bought Saabs.

It actually unlocks its own doors for you!  But not much else.  C’est tellement de luxe, n’est-ce pas?

Dauphine, French for princess!  Even though the French abandoned the monarchy in the 1700’s!

Hillmans were lower-range cars made by Rootes, which was a second banana British car manufacturer.  Their biggest impact on America was the design of the Dodge Omni and Plymouth Horizon, two hideously ugly early 80’s hatchbacks.

And check out the kreepy kid in the back seat!

Don’t get me wrong, I love Renaults, I really do, I just can’t think of a worse time in US history for them to have hit the domestic market.

I am heading to San Antonio to visit some relatively distant …relatives.  To be more precise, Boerne.  I haven’t any clue what Boerne is like, only that it seems to be a rather conservative escape conduit for upper-middle-class white people who feel the need to vacate San Antonio.  Either way, family is family, and I haven’t seen these folks in at least 5 years, maybe as long as 9 or 10 years.  That means I might shave my face for the event!  They are probably used to a lovable pre-pubescent scamp that I simply no longer can claim to be.

Even though I would like to take my own car down there, I will abstain, considering that the belt or pump or whatever that controls the A/C and power steering is out and the part has not been delivered yet.

I am not sure what to say to my distant family — I’ve moved around a lot… I’m back in Austin but don’t really want to remain here… why did you move to Boerne?  My family as a whole is pretty small and spread out, so I really only keep in touch with about 6 or 7 people.  Speaking about myself to crowds is not something I enjoy, but I usually manage to pull it off like a bronze-medalist at a Toastmaster’s Club speak-off.

Now that I have a car, I realize how much I am not a convertible person, or a car person for that matter.  I only keep the roof down because of the aforementioned A/C issue, and I still find myself parking the car and walking in as opposed to driving thru. To be fair, I have been driving around Austin a lot lately, but that’s solely because I’m getting my kicks out of driving, something I haven’t really done in 4 years.  But all the places I go to, or even when I feel a lovely breeze through the cowl of my blue barchetta, I wish I was elsewhere.   This car might last me a while, long enough for me to wonder what city I could possibly want to move to that is good for cars.

Probably nowhere, because in the long term, me and automobiles are anathema to each other.  The cities I truly feel I belong in are walking cities, are subway and train cities, are cities where empty space is not wasted — I want to live in a place where land is meant for people, whether it be apartments or parks — any remaining land should be too steep, too deep or too treacherous for urbanization.

Part of what annoys me about Austin (and a number of other places in America) is that the “urban” zone is not urban enough, and then the rural land/countryside is too suburbanized.  The moment I visited Malmo, Sweden, I saw for the first time how a city, large or mid-sized or small, should be ideally built. After you hit the Swedish mainland from the Oresund bridge, you see flat farmland, green, kind of boring in fact, like the flatter parts of Kent or Sussex. Then, a train station with a few apartment buildings and a Home Depot-type place clustered around it. After you watch exactly 2 people disembark, it becomes flat countryside again, misty and green still, placid and pleasant in an unpretentious, Swedish sort of way, never going to be the Schwarzwald or the chalk cliffs of Dover, and not really wanting to be. Another 10 minutes go by, 10 minutes of countryside, and you begin to wonder where Malmo actually is.

A distant, flat line appears on the horizon, and suddenly you’re knee-deep in 5 story buildings, 3 story buildings, gardens, a big box shopping center even. Then before you can blink, your train veers dramatically left and you are in Malmo Central, and no sooner is the train stopping than are the good-looking families taking their light bags with them, ready to eat lunch. That’s it, folks, that’s what a city should be — not the country. None of this trailer-park, XXX video, “Homes from the 250’s”, car dealership strip boulevard nonsense that flanks Austin and most other cities in the US. Country here, city there.

But I have to temper my thoughts, at the risk of sounding anti-American. My mother used to get irritated when I would feign disinterest in loving America, when I would say things like “I am grateful that I live in a first-world country like America”, implying that Switzerland, New Zealand, Britain or Norway would be about the same to me. What I always wanted to tell her, but didn’t because she is the type to ground or punish simply due to tone of voice, is that I bitch about America because I want it to be better. There is nothing more patriotic than saying that you have higher expectations for your nation.

Until America starts becoming more like Malmo, I will have to cling to the largest cities at the cost of a convertible and affordable rent.

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