Miata Photos
World Serious
After last night’s Detroit Flop the Red Sox are in the 2013 World Series. Their opponents will be the St Louis Cardinals and what I’m kind of hoping is it goes like the last time these two teams met in the “Fall Classic” in 2004, the Sox swept the Cardinals in 4 games. What will probably happen is more like when they meet in both the 1946 and 1967 World Series, the Cardinals won in 7 games.
What I do know is that I envision anywhere from four to seven long, tense nights on the couch watching baseball.
Cherahala Skyway Photos
A few of the Deals Gap photographers have now branched out and stationed someone over on the Cherahala Skyway to maximize coverage. I didn’t know this until we stumbled on one Saturday.
I was right on the tail of a Camaro RS that I was slowly reeling in turn by turn when I spotted the US129 Photos banner and tent with a guy and a camera. Thinking that I was too close to the Camaro for the photographer to get a good shot of the Emperor I went around the next corner to a small straightaway and did a quick u-turn. This time I passed by the photo spot unhidden. We flew by to get photographed, quickly found another turn around spot on the other side and went screaming by again.
New Royal Portrait
This past Saturday we got up just before dawn so we could have a really good chance of running through the entire 318 turns in 11 miles that is Deals Gap unimpeded. And our planned worked to perfection. I got to drive both from south to north and back from north to south without having to slow down for anything except my fear of driving off the mountainside.
After the first trip through, at the north end, we pulled into what used to be a gravel lot, but is now paved and took a brief break. We only stayed for a minute or so for fear of some slug of a vehicle getting in ahead of us. Just as we hopped back in the Emperor a car did go by heading south, but I wasn’t too worried about it slowing me down as it was a 2-door BMW 3 series. To be sure he would be no trouble we took another brief break after about a mile at the Calderwood Dam overlook at the top of the hill.
In the 15-20 minutes since we passed the approximate mid-point of the Gap, one of the intrepid “Tail of the Dragon” photographers had set up shop. This resulted in the photo above, 1 of 5 he took on my way by,which is now become the Emperor’s new Royal Portrait. As it turns out we probably didn’t need the break, because when I went to find that morning’s photos, the set right in front of ours was of that white BMW and it had M badges on it, so if the driver was there like me, to “drive” the road, I couldn’t have kept up with him if I tried.
The Miata Is As Good As A Pickup*
*on a non-rainy day
A 12′ wide x 12′ long piece of carpet gets brought home easily from Home Depot.
And, believe it or not, Donna was able to ride home comfortably in the passenger seat as well.
Social Outcasts
In yesterday’s post I mentioned that you could run on the track both Friday and Saturday. I only showed you Friday’s results. That is because there were no Saturday results for me.
Back in 1991 the Miata wasn’t the center of our universe, that didn’t happen for a few more years. We were still into bicycling pretty big and the Miata was just a really sporty means to transport our bikes. So on Saturday morning, instead of driving around Roebling Road Raceway, Donna and I met up with the Coastal Bicycle Touring Club and rode 50 miles with a half dozen or so folks. We met at a Park N Ride lot off I-95 northwest of Savannah and rode to Bluffton to eat lunch at the famous Squat & Gobble, then riding back along the same route.
When the 1991 Miata National Event was through on Sunday morning the last thing we did was drive to a closed shopping center where a professional photographer got up on the roof and took a group portrait. I don’t think every car that was at the event made the trip to get photographed, but a vast majority did. I count 100 cars in the picture above. The first row consists of one car of each color the Miata was available in then (they had just added silver and British Racing Green in 1991.) We got to the photo spot fairly early, but they took one look at our car and told us we would have to wait until everyone else arrived before we would be lined up. They didn’t want us to spoil the Miata aesthetic.
Our crime was a bike rack on the back of the car with two bicycles sticking up. Click on the top photo and it will enlarge, where if you look at the last row where the round looking tree is, there is a gap because no one wanted to park right behind our blue car…
Emperor’s New Clothes – Literally
Dumpster Day is Friday. It’ll be placed in front of the garage for ease of use, so if we want to use the Miata during the BKR it needs to spend a month outside. To keep the neighborhood felines from leaving footprints or anything else behind on car I decided to buy a nice little car cover. As long as it doesn’t get to dirty or damaged I should be able to recoup around 50% of my purchase price by selling it once the dumpster is gone.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1199