Miata Mileage

32,000 Grains of Sand

Not too far south of Aiken on the way to Hilton Head Island this past Friday, the Emperor glided past the 32,000 mile mark. And after a walk on the beach followed quickly by a trip to Piggly Wiggly, there are now about that many grains of sand embedded in the floor mats…

I would vacuum the car and wash the salt mist off if it wasn’t so damp and dreary this afternoon. I may shake out the mats and do a Quik Detailer wipe down later tonight. We are headed to Palm City FLA for a quick Christmas visit with Donna’s sister, leaving Thursday AM, and the weather for the trip down and during the visit is calling for rain, so I may not even bother.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 378

31,000 Miles

Either sometime last night or early this morning the Emperor passed the 31k mark. I’m betting it was yesterday sometime as the odo tonight, when I noticed it, read 31038.

I have narrowed down all the Miata photos I have taken in the last year to the 20 finalists for the 2006 calendar. I need 13, one for each month and then one for the cover page. I’ll probably create a separate gallery for the calendar. While I’m at it I might do a gallery for the 2005 photos too. The seven also-rans from 2006 and the ones already in the Miata gallery that aren’t in the ’05 calendar will still fill the regular Miata Gallery well enough. I wonder if the PHP gallery software I’m using allows subdirectories?

Guess I might never know. I just clicked on the automatically generated link on each gallery page that is supposed to take you to the author’s web site and he hasn’t renewed his web hosting agreement. I guess now is the time to try the enhanced version that I downloaded a while back. At least that web site is still up.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 349

30,000 Orange Barrels

30,000 Orange BarrelsOn last night’s trip up to the mountains to spend the night, there was construction on US441 between Clayton and Dillard, GA. We must have past 30,000 of those orange construction barrels as the Emperor past through the 30,000 mile mark.

Yesterday morning I washed the car because we had a MMC event in the early afternoon. This was our Senior Drive. One of the Club members is the Administrator of the Elmcroft Assisted Living Center in Martinez. He and I concocted a scheme in which the Club would come over and take the residents who wanted to go on a top down Miata drive instead of their usual Saturday 8-passenger van ride. We had a perfect day for it too, lower 70’s and a cloudless blue sky. We had 5 cars and 5 passengers for the first trip and when 4 more people showed up, we did a second slightly shorter trip for them. The one fellow who I drove was so appreciative that I was embarrassed by it. This is definitely an item we should do at least once a year.

When we got up this morning in the north of Georgia it was in the lower 30’s and there was a layer of frost covering the car. We wimped out for the first couple of hours of driving. The leaves didn’t cooperate in the whole picturesque, blazing fall color, Norman Rockwell painting we had hoped to see, but you take what you can get and we got extremely patchy color. We even did a 20-mile segment of the Blue Ridge Parkway in hopes, but the colorful vistas never materialized. There was one short stretch of NC 215 coming down off the parkway that in a matter of minutes we went from bare trees to patchy color to green. Never the less we had a wonderful time in our 24 hours of the mountains. We got in a night away from home, a short hike in the woods, a look at a beautiful twin waterfall and miles of twisty roads.

Started down, went up, back down, back up, down again, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 343

29,000 Matchbox Cars

29,000 Matchbox Cars29,000 pairs of socks. 29,000 knives. 29,000 VHS tapes. 29,000 out of date bottles of asprin. And 29,000 used chainsaws.

Today we went to the Jockey Lot outside of Anderson, SC. Someone thought it would be fun, so we planned a trip with the MMC and it was a nice day for a drive. While the Jockey lot is a huge ass flea market, pretty soon it all starts to look alike, did we have fun? You bet. Will we go back? Doubt it. About halfway there the Emperor passed through the 29,000 mile mark. We bought this Miata just before Thanksgiving in 2003 so it looks like we will make it past 30k before the 2 year mark.

Most of the time the skies were blue with scattered clouds, but on the horizon, in every direction you looked there were dark gray clouds. The weather forecast called for a chance of rain and while it never did (on us anyway) everytime we stopped for any lentgh of time everyone put their tops up in case. On the way back we stopped in the quaint little town of Abbeville for lunch. We parked over on the same street as we ended up at the last Trivia Road Rally the MMC did in May. I had snagged a picture of one of our member’s cars as it was parked and the wall and art there made a nice back drop, today the Emperor had it’s portrait taken there too.

Can’t really tell from the picture, but the car was really dirty. I did wipe off the big stuff with a towel I keep handy, but when we got home the car got a much needed bath.

Started up, went down, went up, back down, back up, down again, up again, then down, then up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 322

28,000 Miles

Somewhere in eastern Tennessee today the odometer changed from 27999 to 28000…

27,000 Tiny Little Bugs

Just at the start of last night’s Master’s Miata Club Bug Splat Rally the odometer slid past 27,000 miles. There weren’t a lot of large bugs out, but this morning I had what’s left of 27,000 “ghost bugs” on the nose of the formerly clean Miata.

27,000 Ghost Bugs

A little Meguiar’s Quik Detailer and they wiped right off. Ooh, that reminds me, I did the nose, but didn’t clean the windshield, BRB…

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 277

26,000

What started out as a Saturday day trip turned into a Friday & Saturday overnighter on basically a whim. Donna and I had sort of planned an impromptu trip up to Deal’s Gap for Saturday. It is the weekend of annual Miatas at the Gap, an unofficial (inter)national meeting of Miatas in the western mountains of NC.

Earlier in the week we decided to get a hotel room in Anderson, SC for Saturday night so we wouldn’t have to go there and back in one day.

About 7:30 Friday night Donna’s mom said, “I thought you we leaving tonight?” A seed was planted. We checked the radar and it didn’t look good, all green between here and Anderson. So we just packed our bag as if we were leaving in the morning. About 8:15 we looked at the radar again and the green was dissipating. Hmmm, called the hotel, they had a room. Threw some more clothes in the bag. Checked the radar as we were leaving and there was hardly any green showing. We did manage to make it all the way to Anderson with the top down. Had to drive through a few sprinkley patches, but we stayed dry.

The Emperor passed the 26,000 mile mark about 10 miles out of Aiken.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 242