I wrote the first draft for this essay from a window seat on an airplane while returning to Chicago after a Las Vegas vacation. This is an annual trip for me, but the added bonus this year was that it was also in celebration of a buddy’s milestone birthday. It was also my first Vegas trip with this particular friend group, with all of us originating from mid-Michigan or specifically from the Flint area. Tim and I were part of the same high school graduating class.
There were several reasons for the selection of this Probe GT as today’s subject car. It was a different black Probe that I had previously written about at CC when I had made my literary faux pas involving the word “behest”, an incident to which I had recently made reference in my piece on a ’98 Plymouth Neon Expresso. The other reason is that, as is my normal tradition, I did a whole lot of exploring in Las Vegas, with exploration being Ford’s intended context around this model name, which had first been applied to a series of show cars. (RIP, Probe I, which was lost in a trailer fire earlier this year.) Read the rest of this entry »