Miata Mileage

101,000 Gator Fans

Pardon My WakeReturned from home Florida today in a marathon 13 hour 607 mile drive, making 8 pit stops along the way. Two for meals, one for a snack, two for gas and 3 just for driver changes. Somewhere south of Orlando the Emperor passed through the 101,000 mile mark. Total mileage for the trip – 1608 miles.

We are always careful about checking for Clemson home football games before heading into the SC upstate, but completely forgot to check for a University of Florida game before planning our route home. We were “forced” off of I-75 near Ocala by the rapidly multiplying Gator fans on their way to the game. Turns out it was for the better though, as we got to retrace some of our route down along some fantastic rural central Florida roads in the opposite direction.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 499

100,000 UFOs

100 GrandJust shy of Bowman, the Emperor, Donna and I split a candy bar in honor of his latest mileage achievement.

From Aiken, SC to Pooler, GA it is 136 miles as the Google flies, but we traveled 288. Along the way we visited an honest to God (pun intended) Abbey with real monks and stuff to look at 47 different nativity scenes in media that varied from rolled newspaper to stainless steel. We geocached in 3 different counties, finding 5 and DNFing one. We had Japanese for lunch, American for dinner and we are spending the night in a hotel that doesn’t have ice machines.

Tomorrow we cross into the other world where you can’t get sweet tea to drink, but you can get a paperweight made of a baby alligator head encased in lucite, the glorious Sunshine State, Florida.

Started up, went down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 481

99,000 Pieces Of Candy

Just south of Abbeville on the way home from a washed out caching/leaf peeping trip the Emperor passed the ninety nine thousand mile mark. Right now he is backed into the garage with the door partway up and a light shining on the vampire teeth…

Trick or Treat

Started up, went down, back up, down again, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 464

98,000 Pieces of Coal

Loading CoalSaturday the MMC took a trip to Winnsboro to visit the South Carolina Railroad Museum. This weekend there was a visiting steam engine to give that old time feel (and smell) to your train ride. We combined the Club’s monthly breakfast with the train event, plus following the hour long train ride we drove to a nearby town for lunch making for almost a full day Miataness.

After lunch Donna and I went our separate ways from the group because we had an alternative agenda, that’s right, geocaching. Before leaving we made tentative dinner plans with another MMC couple to meet in Lexington at the Uno Chicago Grill at 5:30 to complete the Trifecta (all 3 meals out.)

Got all caught up chasing camo’d containers in the north central part of the state and ended up not being able to make it back to Lexington in time for pizza with Rudy & Patti. We were disappointed on two levels. With the dreary day and approaching of dusk we opted for the more direct way home from where we were and resigned ourselves to eat in Newberry at whatever place we could find. Luck was on our side though, willing to dine in a Hardee’s or a Subway, we stumbled on The Flying Pie on Main St and had a wonderful pizza about half way between the thin crust of West One in Hendersonville and the thick Chicago style pie in Lexington.

Saturday by the numbers:
299 – Miles driven on the day
98,000 – Total miles now on the Emperor
1 – Tank of gas used
5 – O’clock wake up call
14 – Hours from leaving home until returning
58° – High for the day, 20 below normal
9 – Cars in a line (7 Miatas, 1 Boxster and a Jeep)
11 – Mile train ride (5-1/2 under steam power)
100 – Pounds of coal burned by the train per mile traveled
8 – Caches found
3 – SC County Challenge caches and
2 – DeLorme Challenge pages finished

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 437

97,000 Calories

This morning we took a little trip downtown to St. Mary’s School’s Annual Chocolate Festival. We didn’t consume anywhere near the 97,000 calories that were on display at the bake sale tables. It was probably somewhere between 97 and 970 because all we spent on cookies and brownies was a buck and a quarter.

We spent $11 dollars on used books. Donna bought 16 kids books for nephew James at a quarter a piece and I bought 3 hardcover books. The one book that cost the most, nearly 50% of our book expenditures was Lee Child’s 2007 Jack Reacher tale, Bad Luck and Trouble.

I’m 150 pages into the 370 page book, it’ll probably be finished before tomorrow night. Chapter 13 starts like this:

At six the next morning Reacher went up to Neagley’s suite. He found her awake and showered and guessed she had been working out for an hour. Maybe in her room, maybe in the hotel gym. Maybe she had been out jogging. She looked sleek and pumped up and vital in a way that suggested there was a whole lot of oxygenated blood doing the rounds inside her.

After the festival we took the long way home via the bypass so we could drive by and look at, quite literally, the biggest thing to ever happen to Aiken. It has been the talk of the town since last weekend when the 300 foot long 1.89 million pound transport carrying a giant generator parked along the side of the road east of town. There is a photo in this article from the local paper, but you cannot get any idea how big this thing is from it. Plus in addition to the transport rig there is about a 1/4 miles worth of support trucks parked along with it.

Somewhere during our excursion the Emperor passed the 97,000 mile mark.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 412

Numbers

96,000: Saturday while leaving of town the Emperor crossed over that many miles.

398: Number of the Emperor’s top transitions since 10/24/08

194: Total number of caches we’ve found so far.

37: Number of caches we have DNF’d

14: Number of SC Counties we have found caches in.

11: Number of pages of the SC DeLorme Atlas we have found caches on.

7: Number of minutes left until the next episode of TDTVS2 starts.

Started up, went down, back up, down again, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 398

95,000 Reflectors in the Middle of the Road

Just like the last semi-major mileage milestone, this one was past on the way to the Stricker Mountain Home (I’m thinking that may need an acronym.) Only this one was about 50 miles further away in Spartanburg, not right here in Hendersonville.

With what is arguably one of the best bullpens in the American League, why oh why is the back-up shortstop pitching an inning of relief? (I know it is a 9-2 blowout the wrong way, but still…)

Even though there was a lot of rain around the state we made a good proportion of the drive up with the top down. We probably could have made the whole trip with it down, but I chickened out as we came into NC.

Started down, went up, back down, back up, down again, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 366