Our good buddy Greg decided that his spe­cial mid-life cri­sis car needed one more lit­tle spe­cial touch, a sort of cherry on top if you will. A per­son­al­ized license plate. The South Car­olina DMV doesn’t have any­way to check and see if a par­tic­u­lar plate is avail­able, so you have to pick three options, pay your money (only $30) and take a chance. Greg got his first choice, GETOPLES.

The first day he drove the car to work with his new plate on, one of The Valve Store’s™ many Robs came back and asked him what “gee-tōp-els” meant in Greek. He was of course kid­ding, but Greg missed it and tried to explain that it meant Get Top­less because it was on a con­vert­ible, top­less top-down. Yeah, we got it Greg.

I guess he took enough rib­bing on Mon­day and Wednes­day about not bring­ing the new car out in the rain, that today, in spite of the fore­cast of more rain, Greg did drive it to work. Or maybe it was because he had an appoint­ment to get the win­dows tinted in the after­noon, but what­ever the rea­son, there Jackie O was, cov­ered in rain­drops in a very damp park­ing spot this morning.

There are two schools to fill­ing the gas tank of your car. The first school is when the pump shuts off, you take it out of the filler tube and hang it back on the pump. This results in a set of total ran­dom num­bers which is fine for some and a Type B per­son­al­ity trait. The sec­ond school is for the Type A per­son, when the pump auto­mat­i­cally shuts off, they will then bump the nozzle’s lever in small incre­ments until the dol­lar total is even or at best 25¢ steps.

Over­all I am def­i­nitely a Type B per­son­al­ity, but when it comes to fill­ing my gas tank I exhibit Type A lean­ings. I have always tried to get my gas total a nice even (for a bet­ter word) num­ber, partly for me, but also for my unmis­tak­ably Type A wife and house­hold CFO.

On our last trip back from Florida I started to sub­scribe to an alter­nate of the sec­ond school, or a third school if you will, trig­gered by an inci­dence of the first school. While fill­ing up some­where south of Gainesville the pump shut off at $32.32 and I was intrigued enough to leave it right there. Rein­force­ment came when we went inside to buy some snacks and a Geor­gia DeLorme atlas for future geo­caching adven­tures, the total of our pur­chases came to exactly $32.32.

This alter­nate school is dif­fi­cult to achieve, because, like hit­ting the even dol­lar, it comes round only so often. For­tu­nately my Type B-ness allows me to be fine with achiev­ing some even num­ber (2nd School) and fail­ing that, any old total (1st School.)

Tonight’s fill up — $29.29

A Lam­borgh­ini Gal­lardo Spy­der parked just like a pedes­trian Camry at the North Augusta Riverview Activ­i­ties Cen­ter on an early Sun­day morn­ing. “Honey, I’m going down to the park and go run­ning. I’m tak­ing the Lambo.”

It still has the local Mer­cedes dealer paper tag on the back and judg­ing by the wheels I’m think­ing it is a 2007 model. It is much smaller than I imag­ined it was, looks not much big­ger than a Miata. But in truth, this car is 14 inches longer, 9 inches wider and only 3 inches shorter in height. It weighs a whop­ping 900 pounds more than a Miata, but that penalty is nicely off­set by the 420 more horses than than the Mazda’s 140. I won­der how much a 4 year-old Lam­borgh­ini goes for?

The North Amer­i­can Autoshow just fin­ished up in Detroit and my new favorite car com­pany debuted a new pro­duc­tion car there, the Veloster. I have praised their recent designs, the Tuc­son, the Elantra and my love for the Sonata’s looks knows no bounds, but what were they think­ing with this:

That is a face only a mother could live… Every pic­ture I see of this thing does not make me like it any more, it just reaf­firms the ugli­ness of it. Then I saw it in action:

Doesn’t look too bad in motion. Some folks have called it the CRX that Honda should have built, so maybe I should put it on the pos­si­ble new car list, after all I was con­sid­er­ing a CRX before I got side­tracked with this whole Miata thing. I’ll need a dif­fer­ent color choice or two, then I will have to fig­ure how to make it look like it is mov­ing while parked…

Donna has been hav­ing some sec­ond thoughts about a Hyundai Sonata recently. It is big! It has 4 doors which means peo­ple might ask us for rides.

A fel­low at work recently bought a Mini. It is a red Cooper S with a white roof and red bon­net stripes and it has rekin­dled our mild infat­u­a­tion with these cars. We test drove one back in 2003 and came away feel­ing a lit­tle like Dud­ley Moore did after bed­ding Bo Derek in the movie 10, i.e. disappointed.

Well, just the other day she says to me, “Maybe we should look at a Mini again?” Coin­ci­den­tally, that night, I hap­pen to see a com­mer­cial on TV about leas­ing a new Mini for $199 a month. Hey, I could do that, what with keep­ing the Miata, the Mini would be shar­ing dri­ving duties, so keep­ing it below 12,000 miles a year would be easy.

The lease deal has a few road­blocks. I’ll list them in order of mag­ni­tude: First it must be well equipped and list at above 23,100 smack­ers, this shouldn’t be a prob­lem. Sec­ond it has to be an auto­matic, that will be a slight issue. I could get used to dri­ving one, but find­ing one…the Greenville dealer has 12 on the lot and not a sin­gle one is a slush­box. Charleston’s dealer has 11 with the same prob­lem. Of course I have no idea if this is accu­rate because the price of all 23 Minis range from $20,100 to $27,100 and each and everyone’s descrip­tion is iden­ti­cal as far as stan­dard equip­ment and installed options. The third is the final nail in the cof­fin though, the deal ends on Novem­ber 30, 2010. Today!

Sorry. I had this nice long post rem­i­nisc­ing about where I was when Neil Arm­strong first set foot on the moon 41 years ago today, but I don’t have time. I wasted the evening watch­ing a so inten­tion­ally bad buddy cop TV show that *is* actu­ally funny, The Good Guys and a so inten­tion­ally over the top show about cars that you don’t actu­ally learn any­thing use­ful from it, Top Gear.

Maybe I’ll write that moon land­ing post next year (because we all know how emo­tional a 42nd anniver­sary can be.)

Oh, never mind, I just found out the whole thing was a gov­ern­ment spon­sored hoax: Con­spir­acy The­o­rist Con­vinces Neil Arm­strong Moon Land­ing Was Faked

Some­one rec­om­mended this movie to me, even told me it was watch it now on Net­flix. Last Mon­day as I sat watch­ing it on the lap­top, my wife looked over at me and asked, “What you watch­ing?” I kind of explained what it was, here is the Net­flix blurb:

Eric Bana makes his direc­to­r­ial debut with this doc­u­men­tary about his biggest obses­sion: his Ford XB Fal­con Coupe, aka “the Beast.” The actor exam­ines his auto fix­a­tion and chron­i­cles his attempts to com­pete in the treach­er­ous Targa Tas­ma­nia race. The Beast has been by his side for more than 20 years — but can it endure this gru­el­ing five-day affair? Jay Leno, Dr. Phil McGraw and auto expert Jeremy Clark­son drop by to share their thoughts.

She said, “I want to see it too.” We both enjoyed it immensely. I did because I’m a car guy and she did because she’s mar­ried to a car guy or maybe because she had recently seen Eric Bana naked (we had watched the Time Traveler’s Wife the day before.) Seri­ously if you like cars, still remem­ber your first car wist­fully or have ever wanted to soup a car with an unlim­ited bud­get and then drive it like a mad man (or woman) on closed pub­lic streets, see this movie. Stream it if you are a Net­flix mem­ber. Before you do, watch a lot of Fos­ters beer com­mer­cials, so you can learn to speak Aus­tralian. Eric was usu­ally easy to under­stand, but his bud­dies who haven’t ever been any­where out­side of Mel­bourne could be a bit tricky some­times. Maybe if you rent it, it’ll have Amer­i­can eng­lish subtitles…

When I went back to work on Tues­day I thanked James for telling me about this movie. He said, “What movie?” I could have sworn it was him as he usu­ally vis­its on his after­noon break and we com­pare movies. James said maybe it was Chris and he’d add the movie to his queue.

Chris is another Net­flix guy and we do occa­sion­ally com­pare movies. The trick with him is that our tastes are nearly the oppo­site of one another, so if he likes a movie, I’ll hate it and so on. Chris had no idea about Love The Beast either, but he’d add it to his queue. Hmmm, curious.

The next per­son I thought of was Bob, my man­ager, who has been know to trade rec­om­men­da­tions with me every once and a while. Same story, he had never heard of it, but would put it in his queue. Now I’m really start­ing to won­der, who might have told me about the movie.

Ah, ha! Had to be Dave and Autumn from the Miata Club, also fel­low Net­flix­ers. We usu­ally find some time dur­ing an event to talk about what we had recently watched and we had to see a base­ball game with them the week before. I dashed off an email. Wasn’t us, came the reply, but it sounds inter­est­ing, we’ll add it to our queue.

I’m begin­ning to think I might have dreamed get­ting that recommendation.

On our trip down I-95 in Florida on last Thurs­day I saw a most inter­est­ing car. I was in the cen­ter of the three lanes when I noticed a small black sedan with dark tinted win­dows approach­ing fast. In the cen­ter of the grill was a shiny oval badge with a large L in the cen­ter. The car was a Lexus. It looked smaller than their small­est cars the IS and as it passed by I didn’t rec­og­nize it. Now I’m a car guy, I read prac­ti­cally every major car mag­a­zine and check Auto­Blog every day, so if Lexus has a car below the IS I would known about it. Once the car was past me I could see the back of the car and right there on the left of the trunk was a chrome Lexus badge, in the cen­ter of the rear panel was another oval Lexus logo where they were sup­posed to be. On the right side of the trunk was the clincher, a chrome IS250. A neigh­bor used to have an IS250 and this was def­i­nitely not one.

I wasn’t real sure what it was, but I had an idea and it was con­firmed after I had inter­net access, it was a Toy­ota Yaris sedan. Props to the owner for a nearly thor­oughly con­vinc­ing job, he even stayed in the fam­ily so to speak. If he had just com­bined two badges on the back to give the car two let­ters that weren’t on a known model, like say IC250, I might have actu­ally though I spot­ted a prototype.

Down­town Aiken is quiet at 7:45 AM on a Sat­ur­day morn­ing, but that was about to change, the Master’s Miata Club was com­ing for break­fast and the sounds of hun­dreds of buzzing sports cars would soon be bounc­ing off the empty walls. Well, maybe tens of cars with raspy exhausts. Ok, a few two seaters zip­ping around. Actu­ally one Miata coast­ing qui­etly to a stop in front of the Sugar Mag­no­lia Cafe.

Today was the Novem­ber edi­tion of the MMC monthly break­fast and nobody came, Donna and I were unfazed and ate a deli­cious meal. I had the French Toast and she had the Eggs Benedict.

Roger Ster­ling to Joan: Aren’t you even going to have any of this? Look, we’ve got Oys­ters Rock­e­feller! Beef Welling­ton! Napoleons! We leave this lunch alone, it’ll take over Europe.

Post title cour­tesy of The Adver­tis­ing Slo­gan Gen­er­a­tor.

Reggy, the Mas­cot Hall of Fame Mascot.

We went to a rain storm tonight with my sis­ter and her hus­band and a Greenville Drive base­ball game broke out. The game was sup­posed to start at 7:00, but because of storms in the area it was moved to 8 o’clock. Then 8:30. The game finally got under­way at 9:03. If they weren’t afraid of a lit­tle light­ning and just started the game on time it would have been almost over by the time they started it. As it was we left at a lit­tle before 11:00 and the game was just in the bot­tom of the 6th inning.

I’ll try and blog about the Miata Club rally tomor­row It is get­ting late and if I try and write about it now it will be tomor­row when I fin­ish. Let’s just say we fin­ished 3rd (out of four cars.)

Because it was a bor­der­line nice spring day and we were buoyed with opti­mism from our last suc­cess­ful visit, Donna and I decided to walk to Roma Pizza for some lunch. As we approached the end of our street there were two white Ford Crown Vic­to­rias parked side by side with one per­son lean­ing in the win­dow of one of the cars. As he stood up he vel­croed some­thing black around his midsection.

When we reached him, Donna asked him if it was safe to keep walk­ing. We weren’t too far from home and didn’t mind turn­ing around now. He said, “Yeah, go ahead. There was an armed rob­bery at a quick cash place on Whiskey Road.” We con­tin­ued on our way.

Hey, wait a minute, there is one of those places right next door to our des­ti­na­tion. As we walked we dis­cussed if maybe we shouldn’t be walk­ing around here right now. When we arrived at the shop­ping cen­ter there were police vehi­cles every­where. City cops, county sher­iffs and the State police were milling about law enforce­ment vehi­cles of all shapes and descriptions.

While we were eat­ing a local news crew set up out­side and cre­ated quite a stir among the patrons and staff alike. There pres­ence let us know that some­thing impor­tant had transpired.

Too bad that it wasn’t dur­ing the local mid day news broad­cast, because then we could have watched the live news feed on the TV above the bar with one eye while see­ing the reporter and cam­era man with the other as we ate our pizza.

And it was a good thing that we didn’t start out for lunch a half hour ear­lier or we might have stum­bled onto the rob­bers as they exited the cash place through the back door.

This morn­ing the local horse set cel­e­brated the 125th Anniver­sary of Whit­ney Field and Polo in Aiken. There was a parade that started from down­town, wind­ing it’s way through the horse dis­trict and end­ing up at Whit­ney Field for a cou­ple of demon­stra­tion chukkas of polo.

Because it was a beau­ti­ful fall day in Aiken and Whit­ney Field is only about a mile and a half from home, Donna and I walked up to see the parade. There were local politi­cians in shiny cars, polo play­ers on sleek ponies and regal car­riages pulled by teams of horses. After the parade we went over to watch the polo action for a while. The play­ers dressed as play­ers would have in the late 1800s with hats instead of hel­mets and shirts with no num­bers. The teams con­sisted of five mem­bers instead of today’s four. Also, the rules were slightly dif­fer­ent in that back shots were not allowed then and today’s play­ers had a hard time curb­ing that instinct.

You can see about a dozen pho­tos from the parade and the polo on my Flickr! site.

I went in 1995, Spenser did in 1996. He tan­gled with mob­sters, I on the other hand took a cou­ple of pic­tures and bought a T-shirt. If you have been, you will rec­og­nize it in this pas­sage from Robert B. Parker’s Chance, if you haven’t, after read­ing this you won’t need to go — it will be safer, no mob­sters, and eas­ier, you can find images on Flickr! and buy a shirt online.

On the Strip the dry desert night air was full of peo­ple and cars and lights, thick with the smell of exhaust fumes and cig­a­rette smoke, and deodor­ant spray and hair spray and mixed drinks and cologne and des­per­a­tion. There was a lot of energy on the Strip but it was fever­ish, the kind of energy that makes you sleep­less, that makes you drive too fast, and chain-smoke, and drink heavy. The Strip was coked with peo­ple from Keokuk and Presque Isle and North Platte. It wasn’t like it was sup­posed to be. It wasn’t the adven­ture of a life­time, but it had to be. You couldn’t admit that it wasn’t. You’d come too far, expected too much, planned too long. If you stayed up later, played harder, gam­bled big­ger, looked longer, saw another show, had another drink, stretched out a lit­tle farther…

In Chance I did get a Spenser’s Rule, but it was un-numbered. There were a cou­ple other crimestop­per reference’s too — early in Chap­ter 20:

“This is Detec­tive Cooper,” the gray-haired one said. “I’m Detec­tive Sergeant Romero, Las Vegas Police Department.”

“You know I’m a famous detec­tive, and you came here look­ing for crimestop­per tips,” I said.

“Never heard of you,” Romero said, “until we found your card at a crime scene.”

“Pays to adver­tise,” I said.

And this at the end of Chap­ter 32:

If I couldn’t find Abbey Becker in Need­ham, Mass­a­chu­setts, I’d turn in my file of Dick Tracy Crimestop­per tips. As I started back across the bridge to New Bed­ford, I was call­ing infor­ma­tion on my car phone.

As usual we were up before most peo­ple and headed into down­town Vic­to­ria. After find­ing a place to park not too far from the ferry entrance, we next found a place for break­fast. Ended up at a chain, prob­a­bly the equiv­a­lent to our Denny’s, called Smitty’s which had a loca­tion on the ground floor of an office building.

Hunger sat­is­fied, we wan­dered the down­town and the inner har­bor look­ing for a real estate book for a friend who hopes to retire to this area in a few years. We had a dick­ens of a time find­ing one, unlike in Aiken where these books are in nearly every busi­ness and you are never out of sight of a stand-alone kiosk full of them (not unlike gift shops at a Dis­ney theme park) here in Vic­to­ria we had to ask a half-dozen folks before we got a hold of one.

A cou­ple of peo­ple we know, who have been here before us raved about the Inner Har­bor area, with it’s inter­est­ing mix of old, stately hotels & gov­ern­ment build­ings and the pres­ence of an excel­lent provin­cial museum. But to counter bal­ance all that there are lots of tacky touristy stuff like bright yel­low zodiac boats from whale watch­ing com­pa­nies zip­ping about, sou­venir shops and a wax museum. For us the best part was watch­ing a steady stream of sea­planes arrive and leave, bring­ing peo­ple right into down­town from Van­cou­ver & other places.

We were so enter­tained that we almost screwed up our ferry ride back to Wash­ing­ton. The reser­va­tion for the Van­cou­ver to Vic­to­ria ferry yes­ter­day told us we needed to arrive no sooner than 60 min­utes prior and no later than 30 min­utes prior to depar­ture, so we were going on the assump­tion that the one from Vic­to­ria, BC to Port Ange­les, WA would be the same. Wrongo! At about 50 min­utes to the depar­ture time we noticed that there were a lot of cars queued up at the ferry load­ing area. We had a reser­va­tion, so we weren’t too wor­ried about get­ting on, but decided we should get the car and head over. When we pulled in to the line and paid we were near the very back of the line. It was then that we looked on the reser­va­tion sheet I had printed from the Inter­net and noticed in big bold let­ters that we should have been in line 90 min­utes prior to the sched­uled launch because of cus­toms. Luck­ily it is not high sea­son, because they could have given away our spot on the boat. At about the 5 minute mark of the 90 minute cross­ing we entered a fog bank and didn’t emerge from it until we were nearly ashore at the end.

Our first stop back in the US, other than fill­ing up with gas, was Hur­ri­cane Ridge in the Olympic National Park about 18 miles south of Port Ange­les. Spec­tac­u­lar. Unfor­tu­nately the bright sun was high in the sky behind the ridge mak­ing an expo­sure that showed the bright blue sky with a sprin­kling of high white clouds set against the gray/green peaks, some still cov­ered in white snow, with dark green ever­green trees in the fore­ground impos­si­ble. You are just going to have to fly out here and see for your­selves. At an over­look on the way down we said hello to a guy who had just pulled in and he launched into a 15-minute spiel on how the log­ging com­pa­nies, Amer­i­can greed and Bush have nearly destroyed the planet. At one point I had the car in reverse, but couldn’t go any­where for fear of run­ning over his feet. When he saw our National Park map he calmed enough to give us a cou­ple of tips being as he is from the area, 1) the road to one of the rain­for­est trails we had planned on see­ing was washed out about halfway to the end, rend­ing that sec­tion of the park unreach­able and 2) we should stop at Ruby Beach instead of the three oth­ers because it was the most scenic because it had sev­eral sea stacks along it.

He was right on the beach; Ruby was rem­i­nis­cent of the Ore­gon coast we vis­ited last fall and well worth the stop. We won’t even test his other tip and will just head back north up the coast to take in the other rain­for­est area in the park. There are also a cou­ple other places to see back that way that we bypassed on the way to tonight’s bed­ding down spot, Kalaloch Lodge.

And boy are my arms tired. Bada-boom.

Good to be home. On the 60 mile drive home from the air­port this evening we saw maybe a cou­ple dozen cars, in the north­east if you go 6 miles you see a cou­ple thou­sand cars.

Just real­ized that last Sun­day I for­got to change the the top count, I didn’t leave the top down all week while the car was at the air­port, it actu­ally went up before last Sunday’s drive to Colum­bia. Tonight when we landed back in South Car­olina it was just about as cold as it was when we left Jer­sey this morn­ing, so although we wanted to ride home with the top down, we didn’t want to that bad. It stayed up.