Somebody over at MSN took a walk through the old land yacht era, and I read the whole thing nodding like a bobblehead on a dash. You know the cars I mean. The big full-size American cruisers, boats so long you practically had to file a flight plan before you parallel parked one.

The piece makes a point a lot of folks miss, though. In the words of the article itself, these things "weren't just big and slow, they were engineered for distance driving." That's a different animal than a car that's merely big and heavy.

I can't tell you exactly how the writer builds the case, because I'd rather not put words in their mouth beyond what the headline promises. But I can tell you what the premise stirs up in me, and it's a lifetime of riding in and under these machines. My own memory of that era is bench seats built like church pews, soft suspensions that floated over expansion joints, and trunks you could lay a deer down in flat. I speak from family experience on that last one. Take all that as one country boy's recollection, not a history book.

My granddad had an old Lincoln, a late sixties model as I remember it, and I rode in it as a boy on trips down to my uncle's place. You could hear the gravel crunching under the tires on the driveway and that was about the loudest thing in the cabin. Twenty years of farm-truck riding will teach you to appreciate a car that doesn't rattle your teeth. In my memory, anyway, that car was built for exactly one job, hauling people and distance, and it did it about as well as anything I've ever ridden in.

And that's what I keep coming back to. Everybody wants to call these cars outdated, but the mission never went away. We still drive long distances. I've burned plenty of tanks crossing Kansas, more than I care to count. Automakers just chase the same goals with different tools now. The land yacht came at it the old way: room to stretch out and a ride that let you get out of the car feeling like you did when you got in.

So go read the MSN piece yourself and see if it doesn't put you in mind of some old cruiser you rode in once. It's worth a read if you've ever had a soft spot for chrome bumpers you could land a helicopter on.

Tell you what, I'd take one of those old cruisers on my fall run through the Ozarks in a heartbeat. Might burn some fuel doing it. Some rides are worth the gas.