This afternoon the FVFD received a call for a small vegetation fire reported near Capetown. Now Capetown isn’t that far away, but the problem is you have to go up the Wildcat to get there, and our over the hill engine (#3) is the most underpowered engine we own. Going up the hills we probably averaged 10mph, and going down the hills we didn’t do much better because the engine’s brakes are as impressive as it’s raw horsepower. We were figuring the whole way out that it was probably a controlled burn, because it is still way to wet around here to have vegetation burning on it’s own. Sure enough just when we dropped down on the other side of the ridge, we got cancelled. But it made for a nice drive out in the country, and at 10 mph, you can do some serious sightseeing. Not to mention that sitting in a fire engine cab you have some pretty good visibility over the hedgerows so I noticed all kinds of things along the route that I never noticed before. Since I’m usually on that road on my motorcycle, my average speed is, shall we say, a bit more than 10 mph.