Right now, someone is standing at the desk of a Car Rental agency in New England, comparing the 2019 GMC Acadia vs 2019 Ford Explorer. In addition to matters of cost, they are probably weighing the pros and cons of each of the celebrated SUVs in an attempt to determine which one they will choose to pilot on a northbound trek.
Where are they headed? The uncharted frontier of Alaska, made popular by a recent string of homesteading and gold-panning television programs? No. These brave explorers are most likely headed to parts of French-speaking Quebec, or possibly Prince Edward Island. And despite half-a-year of French they had been forced to take in the eighth grade, these intrepid voyagers do not speak the language. They do not know the customs. And without GPS, they probably don’t even know the way.
You see, these bold adventurers know only what they’ve unearthed as a result of their ancestry.com membership, and the DNA kit that they’d probably received at some workplace Yankee Swap back in December.
Flash forward a couple of months, and these independent investigators have determined that their grandparents came down from Canada in the 1930’s. And by backtracking a series of public immigration, baptismal and census records they’ve learned that their family was (i) bigger than they’d realized and (ii) scattered across southeast Canada.
Equipped with this information, a week or two of allotted vacation time (and, most likely, 2-3 kids pretty pissed off that they’re not vacationing in the crystal blue waters of Turks & Caicos) these brave souls set course for the gray-skied beauty of Acadian Canada. But first, they’ll need to rent an SUV with WiFi and a rear-passenger entertainment system…or the young ones will rise against them.
So when both Ford and GMC reporting a spike in rentals of new model year Explorers and Acadias, it seems an interesting coincidence that many of them were being rented by people looking to explore the Acadian provinces. A coincidence perhaps, but one has to wonder if there was any correlation, perhaps the result of some kind of subliminal association.
Is it possible that, somewhere in the shadows, major American automakers have joined forces with ancestry.com and the Tourism Board of the Southeast Provinces to drive up each other’s revenue? Could such a despicable trinity actually exist, playing God with our sense of racial identity and our comprehensive insurance deductibles? Are they even stopping to consider the ramifications? Are they even stopping to think about…the children?
A longshot, for sure…so we’ll file it away in our file cabinet of Lemon Conspiracy Theories. But it’s certainly one that we’ll continue to keep an eye on, searching for clues, and wondering if the sinister triad will actually get away with it..
Also, we have to wonder why more tech-savvy kids aren’t falsifying their parents’ DNA results to show that their heritage can be traced back to Turks and Caicos. I mean, seriously…best vacation ever.
