Cars

Was That Money Well Spent?

The Miata Club’s Bug Splat is coming up and this year we thought we might return to the loop where it all began. We used to start after a meal at a Zaxby’s in Evan, GA by heading north and crossing over the Strom Thurmond Dam into SC before turning south and returning to Georgia for ice cream at a Dairy Queen. It has beeen at east a dozen years since we’ve run that route, so yesterday evening we thought it might be a good idea to run the loop to make sure that suburban sprawl hadn’t obliterated those long stretches of uninhabited roads.

About halfway to Zaxby’s for dinner, after a right turn the Miata hiccuped. Several feet later it hiccuped again. Donna said, “Turn around and take me home.” I took the next right to prepare to make a u-turn and the car died. I coasted to a stop a the side of the road. Like homicide detectives, I don’t believe in coincidences, so I called the shop who just did the work on the car. We were about an hour past their Saturday closing time, but we were hoping someone was still there, maybe catching up on paperwork. No such luck, so I left a long disappointed sounding message about our situation.

Before making the second call for a tow truck, Donna said, “Try and start it back up.” I did and it did. We drove home slowly all the while waiting for the car to stop running again. It didn’t quit, but we did get two widely separated hiccups that causing some breath holding. It was a very hot afternoon, the hiccups and the engine dying, made me get a big whiff of déjà vu. A little more than two months ago, the CTBNL did the same thing on the way to lunch with the Club.

This time it didn’t trigger the Check Engine Light. When we got home I ran Torque Light app and it too showed no fault codes. Anyway for now, I did what I did last time, I put my backup Cam Angle Sensor back in the car. I’m not sure if I should buy a new one or what. Right now the plan is to take it back to the shop to have them look at it. Maybe their OBDII reader will show a code…

On the bright side, the Moto g7 phone is still working after more than a week.

Spray Paint Bounty

A project that has been on my Honey-Do List since I retired, “clean up the garage”, is underway. In cabinet number one I found a treasure trove of cans of spray paint. Several of these I have no idea way I have them and I’m giving them away, so if you see something you like, come on over and its yours.
 

1. Orange High Temp – Was I going to paint the Miata’s muffler? A portion of it is visible from the rear…
2. Red Wrinkle – I did use this to do the valve cover on the Emperor.
3. Custom Automotive Touch Up – Somehow I ordered 24V, a special Australia/Japan only color instead of the 22V Sunlight Silver of the CTBNL.
4. Automotive Clear Coat – I used a little of it to cover the wrong silver from above.
5. Metallic Gold – If I used this, I don’t remember what for…
6. Metallic Silver – Used to paint the black Konig wheel center caps. It didn’t come out nearly as shiny as the cap.
7. Dark Gray Primer – No clue.
8. Light Gray Primer – This went over the black center caps after painting directly on them wasn’t shiny enough. Still didn’t help.
9. Satin Finish Brown – Not sure why I have this either, but I did use a little the other day to turn a black planter pot brown.
10. Satin Finish Olive – This can may not even have been used. If it was, it was a long, long time ago.
11. Clear Top Coat – I think I used this protect a jigsaw puzzle that we turned into wall art.
12. Silver Wheel Coating – This paint is the perfect paint for the plastic center caps of the OEM Miata wheels that have yellowed over time.

Travel Day

Today we left behind Klamath Falls on our way to Granite Falls (not to be confused with Frostbite Falls) and we are about halfway there. Tonight we are in Tillamook, home of Big Cheese and even bigger blimp hangers. Even though about a 1/3 of our route was along the coast, most of it was a bit inland, so that there are no Pacific ocean photos. As a matter of fact I didn’t take a single scenic shot all day.

This photo, taken a week ago, is of our transportation appliance for this trip, a 2019 Chevrolet Malibu in refrigerator white. I’m not sure which model it is, might be the top of the line as it has key-less entry and the dual pane sunroof. The seats aren’t that great, but all in all it not too bad a ride. It had a mere 8400 miles on it when we picked it up at the Portland airport and so far we have added around 1300 more miles on it and we’ll probably tack on another thousand before we are through.

Klamath Kruise Konclusion

From 6:30pm to 9:00pm on Saturday night the city closes a loop on Main Street and Klamath Avenue between 4th and 12th downtown. Any car that was in the show (and I think a few locals sneak in) is free to come and run circles and rev their engines like it was 1962. Hard to say who has the best time at this event, the owners of the classic cars getting to showcase their ride as they cruise downtown or the spectators who get to see them in action!

Kruise of Klamath

We knew about the Kruise of Klamath, a several hundred classic car gathering in its 14th year, and planned our trip to be here just so we could see it. Today was the first big day of activities, through out today there were 4 mini Show & Shine events scattered around town that ran for 2 hours each. Tonight there is a Sock Hop at a downtown theater. We only visited the 8:00 to 10:00 one because we knew tomorrow we were going to the big one in a local park.

After the car thing we headed back into the hills south of downtown to do some more geocaching. We found five in a row, numbers 3 & 4 twice, and on the 6th were stymied. We walked a total of 4.2 miles in three separate loops, two of them overlapping.

On loop #1 we got to the first cache and realized we didn’t have a pen to write in the log book. Fortunately there was a pencil in the container. At cache #2 there also was a pencil. Number #3 had zero writing utensils. We headed over to cache #4 hoping it held something to write with, ideally it would have two, so we could take one with us. If it had just one we would borrow it, walk back to cache #3, sign that log and then return the writing thing back to #4. All that was for naught as the fourth container was too small to hold any kind of writing utensil. We contemplated just packing it in or driving the 3 miles one way back to the AirBnB. Then I remembered the Visit Klamath Info Center was right down the hill, 1/4 mile from the trail head, they’d have free pens.

As we pulled into the visitor center we saw a couple pop up tents right next door with a sign that said Gambler 500. After using the rest rooms and grabbing a few Visit Klamath pens we walked over to see what that was all about. Think 24 Hours of Lemons but off-road. You spend $500 on your race vehicle and get from Point A to Point B, 500 miles away, traveling on as few paved roads as possible. Looks like it is absolute insanity, so you know it is a blast. I didn’t think it would be wise to try and do it in the rental Chevy Malibu.

So we drove back up the hill to the trail head and went back to both cache 3 & 4 to sign the logs. From there we headed further into the park to look for more, but after one more cache and another quarter of a mile walk one-way, it was past noon and time for lunch. And we knew just where to get a free lunch. One of the Gambler 500 check points, Uglade Precision Driveshafts, was offering free hot dogs and hamburgers for participants and the public alike. We got to chat with company owners, several knuckleheads who were doing the Gambler and had lunch.

Being as it was still early afternoon and the sun was shining we decided to do a little more geocaching. This time we went to a different trail head for a couple of reasons, one was to find some caches and the second was because it would bring us near a cache we found on Tuesday that was a book cache. When we found it, Donna grabbed a book that she would read and then we could return it. Well, she read part of it, but couldn’t finish it so we wanted to put it back. After doing that we headed off to the next one, but after searching for about 10 minutes and having no luck we decided to go get some ice cream and call it a day.