In this year’s Motoring Challenge the two big point earners, worth nine each, are the Wienermobile and a Blimp.
Getting a handle on the Wienermobile location is supposed to be easy, just download the app and you can find out where any of the 6 vehicles will be on a given day. There were early rumbling on the Moss Motoring group Facebook page that the app was way wrong and a couple of folks showed up only to not see a Wienermobile. Didn’t matter to me because when I first tried to load the app on my phone, the Google Play store wouldn’t let me, it told me my device was incompatible.
I heard Twitter was supposed to be the way to go while they fixed the app, but the information I found was somewhat incomplete. It gave a date and city, but not an actual location. And it only went out so far and then when that date passed, it never posted another schedule. I tried to create a Google news feed that tracked mention of the Wienermobile, but that usually resulted in getting a story once it had been and gone somewhere.
Guessing it was going to be in Atlanta on Superbowl Weekend, I checked the Atlanta paper online and found out it actually would be there and it listed specific locations. So we made plans to drive over and back the Saturday before, but in end the weather was supposed to be rainy and we hate driving in Atlanta, so we didn’t go. There is one of the Wienermobiles assigned to the southeast region, so we knew we would find it someplace eventually.
Last week I learned that the app was supposedly fixed. I tried again to load it my phone, but it still wouldn’t. So I found a place I could download the APK file and side-loaded it to the phone. Lookie there, the Wienermobile was going to be in Atlanta again this weekend. This time it was going to be in the eastern suburbs, so we wouldn’t have to venture inside the I-285 beltway, AKA The Danger Zone. On Sunday it was going to be at two different Walmarts in Lithonia.
We still had enough points left for one more free room at a Holiday Inn Express, so on Saturday afternoon we tossed a change of clothes in a bag and drove over to a town one further west of where we needed to be on Sunday morning. In the morning when I looked in on Twitter to see if anyone had posted pictures from the event the day before, I was shocked to see that a Wienermobile was at the Daytona 500 in Florida. Knowing they were assigned to regions and the flaky app postings, I wasn’t real confident that our goal would not be waiting for us in the Lithonia Walmart parking lot.
As you can see above, there was a Wienermobile where the app said it would be. Turns out the southeast region Wienermobile was in Daytona, but this one was from the midwest region. I didn’t think to ask them why they were down south. Donna and I chatted with the two “Hotdoggers” for a bit and I think they were happy for the company because at nine o’clock on a chilly, misty Sunday morning there weren’t a lot of visitors. By 9:30 we were back on I-20 heading home nine points richer.
One down and one to go. Now, where is that confounded blimp?