Fer-Cus!
While not a picture of the actual Fercus, The Captain asked me to write a tribute to the Focus as he has sold it and bought a new car. I was supposed to write this a while ago, but as I started writing two of my RAs came to my apartment telling me that someone had shattered the glass front door of the building.
Sigh.
Moving on, then.... the question was as to whether or not there was anything worth remembering or paying tribute to in regards to the Focus. The best story I can come up with is the road trip from Grand Rapids to Atlanta in the winter of 2007 when I helped The Captain move down there. We left Michigan scant hours before a huge blizzard hit that shut down large parts of the Grand Rapids area for a few days.
The trip was fueled by little more than Red Bull, nicotine, and beef jerky. We drove through the night, and when we finally got to Atlanta the two of us were both only vaguely coherent. I know that personally, I had to take a piss about every 15 minutes because my body could not metabolize all the Red Bull and nicotine, and it just wanted to flush it all out. And of course, once we got in to the apartment, we weren't done. All I wanted to do was sleep, but it was insisted upon that if we stopped moving we'd never get moving again. So, we powered through the day.
At some point we were talking about heading somewhere to pick something up, and in my half-asleep stimulant induced state I accidently said "Fercus" instead of "Focus". And thus, the car's official nickname was born.
The Fercus made a few road trips in its time - the journey to Atlanta and the exodus a year and a half later being the most prominent. Along the way there were trips between Holland and Chicago, Holland and Traverse City, and the most recent trips to and from Fort Wayne.
Despite what he says, I don't think The Captain hated the Fercus - he just never loved it. I remember thinking he should have held out for a week or two when he bought it to get a model with the features he wanted, but I also know he wasn't sure if his GTI would make it through that waiting period.
So in the end the Fercus served its purpose. It won't leave a legacy like the Quantum, the Byack!, Los Escort, or that damned Grand Am, but it did its job.
