First road experience

Last weekend, Saturday June 2, 2007 and Sunday June 3, 2007, gave us the opportunity to take our Tribeca to the highway. Our travels on Saturday took us down as far as Ashland, Va., before coming back to our final destination near Beaverdam, Va. The little bit of extra driving allowed us to test the Points of Interest feature on the navigation system, assisting us in finding a grocery store in Ashland. (Ukrops) For the most part, we were dealing with known terrority, but such territory is necessary to learn the ins and outs of the system.

Where Saturday's weather was clear and calm, Sunday was rain, rain and rain some more. It started with a quick switch-out of the floor mats from the carpeted to the all-weather. Doing this in the rain without having examined them prior was not hard - each of the four mats were unique in size and shape, and removing the carpeted ones one-by-one made the match up go quickly.

The conditions also gave a good chance to drive the Tribeca in wet weather, and better yet, test out the views and clearances in such conditions. Traffic was snarled on I-95 for the trip back north to Alexandria, crashing to a halt at the Massaponax exit. We got off at US-1 decided to get out of the rain at Central Park in Fredericksburg, eventually lunching at the new Cracker Barrel at exit 130 (well, new compared to the Massaponax one at exit 126), and proceeded on Fall Hill Ave back over to US-1 for the trip north. (Fall Hill crosses over I-95 just south of the southbound visitors' center) Route 1 really wasn't all that bad, so although the Nav system kept suggesting back to I-95 at every chance, we stayed on 1 all the way up.

Sunday evening allowed us the chance to take the Tribeca on some of the back roads in southwestern Fairfax County, Va., in particular, Henderson Road on the way to Yates Ford to get back to Manassas. The handling of the Subaru engine was in stark contrast to the Honda engine in our 2004 VUE, with the Subaru being easier.

All told, we went from having 20 miles on it at the start of Saturday to almost 220 by the end of Sunday, after having driven all of four miles on Wednesday, May 30th, and none on Thursday and Friday.