Miata Mileage

After spending yesterday cooped up in the house, today we decided to go out and take a couple of photos for the Motoring Challenge. Our goal was to get a picture of a Savannah River sign with some of the river in the background. Some of the folks in the challenge have been posting their River & Lake photos with just the required sign, we on the other hand have vowed to have the named water visible along with the sign.

The Savannah River lies between Aiken and Augusta and we have the option of 6 different bridges to cross to get from here to there. Trouble is, using Google Street View (GSV), I can find no place on either end of those bridges (12 opportunities) where the river itself is visible where a car can be parked and have the sign in the frame too. I did find a few places where it looked possible, but they were all further north. Hoping to get lucky I started our trip by crossing the Savannah on I-20, where there was a nice sign on the SC side, the Street View was correct, but no river visible.

We then turned north and recrossed the Savannah River back into South Carolina hoping that maybe they had put up a nice sign sign the GSV car had been that way 5 years ago. Nope. Eight or so miles later we hung a left and crossed the Thurmond Dam back into Georgia with still no reversing of my Google Street View research. Our next opportunity, which did look promising, was about 30 miles later when we returned back into South Carolina on US378 between Lincolnton, GA and McCormick, SC. The Georgia side sign was not there as they are building a second bridge across the river. Fortunately the the South Carolina sign was still there, but construction forced us into a less than ideal photograph (the one you see above.)

Not real happy with our effort, we drove further north another 25 miles to the next bridge across the Savannah near Calhoun Falls, SC. When using GSV it showed a small sign with the river’s name on it on both the SC side and the GA side. We stopped at the South Carolina side and took a picture. Then because of the angle of the sun, crossed the bridge into Georgia to check if a better shot could be had there. Along with the small Savannah River signs on both sides there were much larger ones for the lake the river had become because of the dam that was between this bridge and the last. In the end we decided to use the above sign for the river and use this one for a lake. All in all we crossed over the Savannah River 6 times.

In the middle of May last year, the Emperor had 140,000 miles on it and after a little less than 148,000 hours since and after our 3rd river crossing today, near Pollard’s Corner, GA, the Emperor passed the 148,000 mile mark.

Right down to the wire. We have until the 31st of December to get our Moss Motoring Challenge photos in the mail to California, so we are out and about racking up the final few points available to us in the “near” neighborhood. Kershaw County, Florence County, City of Quinby and York County. We also snagged a couple bonus points by taking a picture of a business that had Moss in the name. The photo above will not be my entry, I will submit one of the others taken because of the sort of stupid look on my face in this one.

What happens is we arrive at the photo location, I get out, line up the shot I want and hand the camera to my able bodied assistant. I then go pose in the spot I think I should be standing in and wait. Because I almost never know when the photo is actually being taken I often end up with an odd look on my face or my normal unsmiling one.

Tomorrow we head further west and north to fill in the last three spots on the National Park ledger of the contest. The spots don’t have to be actual National Parks, just sites run by the NPS, so we will get Kings Mountain National Military Park, Cowpens National Battlefield and then the Blue Ridge Parkway. Fortunately for us you don’t have to go on or in them either, as the two Revolutionary War sites are closed for the Christmas Holiday and aren’t open until Saturday. And the Parkway goes in two directions from the closest to us entry and both of them go the wrong way from where we want to go at that point, so all we will be doing is getting photos of the signs at the entrances.

When we swapped drivers just outside Bishopsville I noticed that the Emperor’s odometer read 147002.