Masters Miata Club

2018 Spring Steeplechase

Action Photography by Brian

Action Photography by Brian

Again Tom Varallo offered the Masters Miata Club the use of his rail side spot at the spring steeplechase. We, along with three other couples, enjoyed a fabulous day at the races on our Club President. One other member ducked in to say hi somewhere around the 5th race.

We had grilled chicken and hot dogs to eat along with veggies, fruit and chips to dip. There were cookies for dessert and a retirement cake to top it all off for the club’s latest non-productive member of society. You would think that with the Club logo on the sign right in front of our Miata that it would have brought a question or two about Miatas and/or the club, but you’d be wrong. The Club vehicle that attracted the most attention was our “pick up truck”, a 1987 GMC Caballero owned by Hal & Trudy from the Club.

Between a couple of the races one of Donna’s gym rat friends showed up to chat a bit. We were standing by the rail looking away from the track into our tent and beyond when she asked, “Whose cool car is that.” I almost instinctively said, “It’s ours.”, because this question usually refers to the Miata, but hesitated. I asked, “Which one? The little convertible sports car or the classic 80’s pick up/car mix?” She replied, “The pickup thing.” Hal fielded loads questions about the Caballero from both us and passers by, as well as at least one offer to buy it from him on the spot.

Mark your calendars for Saturday, October 27, 2018 when I’ll regale you with stories of the fall steeplechase too, because Tom has said that the offer to share the spot will be good for as long as we want. Until then here are a couple of images from the spring event:

Motoring to a Miata Club Meeting

Thursday was the Masters Miata Club February Dinner Meeting and because they were meeting at a restaurant we like and haven’t been to in a dog’s age, we went. Also factoring in was the weather, for once in a quite a while we caught a day when the temperatures were actually above normal, so we could ride with the top down. For an appetizer, we took a couple of motoring challenge photos on the way over and for dessert, we grabbed one, on the way home.

Chasing Rainbows

On Saturday Donna and I led the Masters Miata Club on the drive to the North Carolina mountains to see some fall color and drive on a few windy roads. On the way home at our last pit stop in McCormick, SC we put the top up because it looked like rain ahead. The top was down when we left home 11 hours and 400 miles ago and truth be told, we were glad of the excuse because it was about time to take a break from the sun, the wind and the noise.

About 10 miles south of McCormick, as we passed through Plum Branch, I looked left at the dark clouds, thanking ourselves on our decision to raise the roof, when I noticed a small segment of barely visible rainbow. Oooh, we need a rainbow for the Moss Motoring Challenge. I conferred with my navigator, and Donna said, “Turn around.” So, I did a U-turn across the 5 lanes of US221 and turned right on SC283. After a bit, we came to a side road, turned down it and stopped. The rainbow segment was still there. I hopped out and took a picture. When we reviewed it inside the car it was fairly disappointing looking. It was recognizable as a bit of rainbow and would probably count, but both of us were unsatisfied.

Because the sun was going down in the west and 283 traveled east and the rain was ahead in the east, we agreed to keep going in that direction hoping for a better rainbow. A 1/2 mile further along down the road it was still wet from the rain having just been there and another 1/2 mile further it started to rain lightly. The two-lane road was surrounded by tall pine trees, but after a slight shift in road direction the sun popped out behind us and the rainbow appeared in front of us seemingly starting right in the middle of the road. I slowed down to pull over and had to pick a spot carefully because there was very little shoulder. By the time I got stopped and jumped out of the car into the light rain, the sun mostly disappeared and the rainbow, while still visible, had faded considerably. I took several vertically orientated pictures to capture the car, road, trees and about a third of the rainbow’s arc. The in-car review of my efforts had us agreeing that this was much better than the first attempt, but still left a little to be desired.

In for a penny, in for a pound, so we thought even though it was a bit out of the way, we’d drive the whole 20 miles east to Edgefield before turning south to Aiken to see if another rainbow opportunity showed up. Because of the recent downpour, the grass was very wet and the ground a little soggy, so as I pulled back onto the road, the back tire started to spin. I eased off the gas and returned to the road somewhat gracefully, but vowed that next time we pulled over to take a rainbow.

Well, not 3 miles further down the road, everything came together, the sun came out, the rainbow brightened and an empty Baptist church parking lot appeared on the right.

Second Saturday in a Row


We have led a Masters Miata Club Event…this week was the annual Bug Splat.

When Donna and I put on this event for the very first time way back in 1999 I had devised it sort of like a rally style start, I would send each car out at 3 minute intervals to guarantee clean air in front of the cars for maximum exposure to bugs. When I tried that the next year everyone balked at it, so I handed out the maps and sent them all on their way. I had underestimated the Club’s love of driving all in one long line (which as it turns out is second only to the love of all eating at one long table no matter how big the group or small the venue.)

By the third year everyone wondered why Donna and I weren’t playing along. When I explained that we didn’t want to steal anyone’s chance at a prize, they all went, “Pshaw, you should have some of the fun too.” We have been leading the line of cars around the route ever since.

It took me a couple of years to figure out the group had ulterior motives for this. They just wanted someone to lead so they wouldn’t have look at a map and/or not get lost, but probably the most likely reason was to decrease their odds of winning the Biggest Bug Trophy which is so ugly it is kind of cool. You either love it or hate it, with the haters having the larger numbers.

As we were loading the trophy in the trunk to bring to the starting point on Saturday, Donna was looking over the list of names of those who have held it in the last 18 years and asked, “How come we haven’t ever won it?”

“Alexa: play ominous music”

That’s right, we won the trophy this year with a silver dollar size splat on the nose of the CTBNL right next to the Mazda logo.

Morning into Afternoon into Night


This morning started with a little event that I wrangled up from within the MMC. Something that started with a video a member posted on the Club site and another member mentioned to me that it would be cool if we could do something like that within the Club. We got all four generations of the Miata together and each one of the owners got to drive each others cars, so that when we were finished we had driven all four models.


This afternoon I started on some valances for the garage and finished about 9:00 PM tonight. A co-worker who does woodworking for fun and profit made the valances for me out of some 1/4″ plywood he had laying around earlier in the week. I started by painting the bare wood with some left over white paint and with Donna’s help picked out about a half dozen old maps to cover them with. She also helped me hang them because there was no way I could hold up a 5′ long valance and somehow reach both ends to screw them into the garage wall.

Tomorrow, the floor.

Masters Miata Club Photo Hunt/Road Rally

Donna and I read the rally instructions when they were first posted on the Club website. We then read them again last night when I printed out a copy for us to put on our clipboard. We were ready.

At the Rally start point we had 8 Miatas, seven that were going to “compete” and our Rally Masters David & Ellie Brock. There were 4 cars from the Masters Miata Club (Donna and I, Don & Kay Boltz, Teri & John Bozzarello and Mike & Shirley Dyer) and 3 cars from elsewhere who found out about the fun from Facebook. There was a couple from Asheville, one from the Atlanta area and a father/daughter pair from Lexington.

David asked for a volunteer that was familiar with Rallying to go first because even though they had rechecked the course just the day before, you never know, something could have changed and this way the first out could call back and some adjustment for mileage might be made. Seeing as Donna and I had done most every rally John and Jackie Nichols ever put on for the Club before, had done a couple put on by the Miata Club of America back when that organization existed and had even designed one for our Club back in the 90’s, we opted to go first. We were ready.

When we have run rallies in the past, because the real pressure is all on the navigator we have been swapping responsibilities back and forth, for this one I was going to navigate and she would drive. I snapped my smart phone into the Garmin GPS mount (go figure, it fit perfectly), attached it to the windshield and started the Google Driving App. We rolled to the start line and were handed the cue sheet:
1. Set trip odometer to zero.
2. [odometer and driver] (odometer must be legible)
3. N
4. R
5. “+”
6. L (Off course clue: T)
7. “2880”
8. L
9. Horse barn
10. R (Off course clue: T)
11. [navigator and fisherman]

Donna reset the trip odometer and then we had to be reminded by Ellie that the next thing we needed to do was take a picture (that’s what the bracketed phrases meant.) This should have been our first clue we might be just a little over confident about how ready we were. There was no time component, so we gathered ourselves and because Cue #3 was N, I told Donna to turn right out of Gregs Gas Plus and we were off. Cue #4 was R, so 100 yards later we turned right on Gregory Lake Road.

The next one was a plus followed by an L, so I said our next instruction is to look for a cross street and turn left on to it.1 After our left turn we started looking for the number 2880, but the house numbers were in the 1900s. It didn’t feel like the right road either, too narrow and the map showed it looped almost right back to Gregory Lake Road. We had traveled a mile and a half and were already off course.

We get back onto Gregory Lake and look for the next cross street. There it is, turn left and the first thing we see is a “look out for tractors” sign. Tractor, that starts with a T, does that mean we are still not on course? I tell Donna to press on. Maybe we’ll see 2880. We don’t, but the next cue is L so I instruct Donna to take the next left. And I start looking for a horse barn. We don’t see a barn by the time we get to a T in the road. Nice navigating Brian, where the heck are we?

I look a little further down the cues and see #11 and just know because of where we are and where we started the fisherman in the picture is the sign in front of Old McDonalds Fish Camp, so I tell Donna to turn right. She takes my picture in front of the sign. Alright, now we are cooking. From here I kept us on course by luck and familiarity with the area for the next couple of cues. But one too many critical words on Donna’s driving forced us to swap seats not long after we didn’t find the next required picture.2

With Donna now navigating we stayed on course for about the next 20 cues and gathered the next 4 photos before we missed a cue and actually hit one of the off course markers several miles down the road. Thankfully Cue #39 was a set of coordinates which we knew we could type into the Garmin GPS and find. This let us get the next picture, so we were starting feel good again. It didn’t last long though as we never found Cue #40, never saw the off course marker and drove and drove until we ended up in downtown Harlem, GA.

At this point we had now been on the road for 2 hours and had traveled around 75 miles and knew we were way off course. Reading through the rest of the cue sheet we saw numbers #52 [car and windmill] & #54 ‘continue to the Sonic Drive In’ and used our area knowledge to use the GPS to take us to the Sonic on Washington Road in Evans.

We were the 4th car to arrive at the ending spot. We ended up getting 7 of the 9 required photos and drove 94.8 miles instead of the 54.2 of a clean run, so I think the number 4 is probably the order we finished in too. The couple from Asheville nailed the thing getting all nine photos while traveling less than a mile more than a perfect run taking home a nice set of engraved glasses.

But how we did was secondary to having a beautiful sunny day to drive around on nice two lane back roads of the CSRA in a Miata. If the Brocks decide to do this again, in spite of the low Club turnout, we will be sure to be there and hopefully do better.