Mini Life

23,000 Rain Drops

Day 12 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Green River, UT. to Wendover, UT. Three geocaches today, one at the start near the hotel, one somewhere in the middle of nowhere Utah and one at the end of the day that is just into the state of Nevada. In between those three spots it was raining, somewhere from drizzle up to pouring down. Most of the time the rain wasn’t a problem until we were on I-80 West going 80 MPH among the 18 wheelers and over-sized loads.

Even though the rain pummeling the front of car while doing 80 miles an hour washed almost all the Texas, New Mexico & Arizona bugs off, the rest of the car needed washing, especially the flat back, so we went to a self-service car wash and tried to clean it up. A serviceable job for now, maybe while in Lake Tahoe I can get a chance to do it right.

Somewhere close to the burgeoning ghost town of Eureka, Utah the Lady Bug crossed over the 23,000 mile mark. When we got to the Bonneville Salt Flats I was going to see about celebrating by trying to see how fast I could her up to on the 2 mile raceway, but because of the rain, the salt was still wet. You are not supposed to drive on it then.

Canyon de Chelly

Day 10 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Albuquerque, NM to Kayenta, AZ. No geocaching today. The first half of our trip was on I-40, and although I had selected a few to look for we didn’t feel like it. The second half of the trip was through Indian Reservations and they do not allow the placement of caches on their lands.

The highlight of the today’s drive was a stop at the Canyon de Chelly National Monument. This place wasn’t on our radar and we wouldn’t have even driven by it (I had a different route planned) except for a random conversation with another traveling couple at lunch yesterday in Madrid. The woman running the Jezebel Soda Fountain said that if we had a chance while out this way we should visit the canyon.

Last night in the hotel room we looked up where it was and there it was, right on the other side of the Arizona border. So instead of cutting diagonally north west across New Mexico to get to Kayenta, we headed due west into Arizona and then north, which was only slightly longer and brought us right by Canyon de Chelly. All we had time for was a drive along one of the rims, we picked the south drive because it had more overlooks and were not disappointed.

Once again we have found a spot in the western part of the country that deserves a longer or second visit. Another one of those places is Arches National Park just north of Moab, UT. Guess where we are going to be driving right by tomorrow? Tomorrows route was specifically planed to be 100 miles less than the usual just so we can venture further into Arches than we did back in 2009.

The Windmills of Your Mind

Day 5 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Abilene, TX. to Monahans, TX. At a scheduled 205 miles, today’s drive is the second shortest of the trip, so we “killed” some time by first driving into downtown Abilene and walking around looking at the 17 storybook statues that are located near the Visitors Bureau.

We also did a bit of geocaching on our short backroad trip west, again finding 4 of the 5 we looked for.

We drove by two separate wind farm installations on the route, one near the town of Merkel, which has the audacity to call itself the Windmill City and one outside Lemesa where this photo was taken, while we hunted for a geocache along US180. Whenever we encounter a wind farm like this I start to hear in my mind the song The Windmills of Your Mind from the original The Thomas Crowne Affair movie.

Tonight’s meal was Mexican. We have been avoiding it as a cuisine on the trip so far, so that we could reserve our taste buds until we got closer to the real deal. We might have waited another day or so until we got into New Mexico, but Donna’s brother Steve, the reason for the stop in this west Texas town, suggested it for dinner.

We in TEXAS Again1


Day 3 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Vicksburg, MS to Tyler, TX. I had picked out a breakfast spot not too far from the hotel, Caffe Paradiso, but when we pulled into the parking lot 3 minutes before their scheduled opening, there were no cars around. Donna popped out, peered into the dark windows and saw zero activity, so we opted for plan B. I found another place in downtown on the internet that sounded promising called The Mad Baker. It was worth the drive, the food was great and Donna bought a souvenir T-shirt.

We have been staying away from President Eisenhower’s National System of Interstate and Defense Highways as much as possible, but after two days that consisted of almost entirely back road driving we blasted across Louisiana on I-20. Just 3 miles shy of doing the entire 189 miles of the state’s Interstate we popped off in Greenwood to loop south a bit towards our overnight stop of Tyler, TX.

We knew we were in Texas long before we saw the sign because the bumpy, cracked, hastily patched two-lane road turned into a smooth as a baby’s bottom, well maintained four-lane. You can tell the oil money in Texas finds its way into the infrastructure unlike in Louisiana, where in ends up lining the pockets of the corrupt political machine.

1. verb omitted in homage to a previous Texas related visit post from five years ago

 

We’re the Hekawi


Day 2 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Birmingham, AL to Vicksburg, MS. Seeing as we are in the Mini and not the Miata, there are no Moss Motoring Challenge photos to take, so to occupy our time while travelling just 200-300 miles a day we are falling back on an old sideline – Geocaching.

For the first 5 days, until we get to Donna’s brother Steve’s house in Monahans, TX, I have mapped out our routes on the geocaching website and downloaded the 40 or 50 caches that we could look for along the way. We will definitely be cherry-picking a whole lot less than that each day, but you never really ever know what or where you might feel like a break from driving.

If you make a custom route on Google Maps, you can save it, but if you call it back up using the app on your phone it loses all the changes and presents you with typical Interstate, fastest time, route to just the destination. If you create the custom route in Google’s My Maps app online and then call it up on your phone the map is there, but you cannot get turn by turn directions from it, nor will it follow the phones GPS, so it is worthless.

Once you have saved a map on the geocaching website it turns it into a GPX file that you can download that is of a rough approximation (ie. doesn’t smoothly follow the actual roads) of the route. This cannot be imported into a Garmin car GPS to use, as in motion routing so that is no help. But I did find an app online, GPX Viewer Pro, that does work for this on my phone. It is not perfect, but it is fine.

Somewhere in the middle of nowhere Alabama we were following along the GPX track fine until we came to a spot where we needed to take a left turn, but there were two of them just 20 feet apart. The GPX resolution was not accurate enough to single out which one to take, so I took the first one. This was a Grade ‘D’ road, it was narrow, really rough surfaced and bumpy as all get out. I asked my navigator to look at the map and let me know how long I was going to be heading in this direction until the next new road. “Eight or nine miles,” came the reply. I said, “Maybe it was the other left. Let’s go back and try that road.” She said, “Let’s.”

I turned around, found the second left and headed southeast again. This road was no better. And it got worse in a hurry, less than a mile in, it turned to gravel. another u-turn and when we got back to the spot between the two turns I pulled off and parked so we could figure out a plan (the above photo is what we saw when we stopped.) We ended up backtracking about 10 miles to get on an actual numbered state highway and gave up on the geocaching for the day.

Curiosity (Nearly) Killed the Mini (Part II)

When we last left our intrepid hero, he had just nudged the plastic case of the socket set enough to knock it off it’s convenient resting place and spill the entire contents into the engine bay…

Go back and read Part I first, I’ll wait.

After putting everything back in the case, turns out most everything had tumbled right through to the driveway below, but I was still missing the the 3/8 to 1/4 adapter and the 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9mm sockets. I could see a glimmer of one socket underneath the padding of an A/C line at the bottom of the engine compartment, but of course I couldn’t reach to get to it from the top. I was going to have to jack up the car to get underneath to look around, but that was going to have to wait as it was past suppertime and would soon be getting dark.

The next day I dropped Donna off at the gym in the Miata so I could have a couple hours to try and retrieve the missing socket set pieces. Of course the Mini has a whole different jack point configuration to prop it up. Minis have a heavy plastic walled open square thing to place your jack onto, but it isn’t shaped to hold the top of a v-shaped jack stand, which I have two of, nor is it the right size to accept to flat pad jack stand which I also have two of.

To get the Mini up in the air, I used the same method I use jack up the Miata. By placing an 18″ length of 2 x 4 centered under the door mirror and placing the pad of the hydraulic jack in the middle of the wood piece you can the the whole side of the car up in the air enough to place the jack stands. To keep the Mini up I placed the flat topped jack stands under the 2 x 4 near the front. When I was finished doing this to both sides, the car was resting on the back wheels with the front end of the car some 10 inches off the ground.

This nose high attitude shook loose two of the missing sockets and a quick crawl underneath let me retrieve the one socket I could see along with another one that was right next it. I discovered a couple of small panels behind the bumper that were held in by threes screws, so I removed them to see if that would help locate the rest of my missing pieces. Nope, nothing from one and all I got from the other was several ounces of car wash water. I crawled back out from under the car and placed the found sockets in their respective holes in the socket set case. I was still missing the 5mm socket and the 3/8 to 1/4 adapter. As I looked at empty spots in the case I realized that the 5mm space has been empty like forever, so really all I was still missing was the adapter.

I removed the grill hoping that it might help, but that just let me see the A/C condenser and radiator better, no other obvious nooks or crannies that would hide a shiny chrome adapter. I dropped the car off the jack stands and started it up.When this did not result in any loud metallic clanking I put it in reverse, dumped the clutch, roared back 20 feet and slammed on the brakes. Then put it in first gear to repeat that process going forward. I had the windows down and didn’t hear metal hit the ground, but got out and looked the length of the driveway in case. No adapter. The next step was a quick jaunt around the neighborhood throwing the car into several 90 degree turns with abandon. The windows were still down and I never did hear any rattles or see anything fall off.

My guess is that the adapter is wedged somewhere really good and the next owners will discover it in a far future engine rebuild or the damn adapter was, like the 5mm socket, AWOL before this whole episode started.

Curiosity (Nearly) Killed the Mini (Part I)

Last week I mistakenly thought the falling pine pollen was through for the season, so I decided to wash the several levels of yellow that had accumulated on the Mini. When drying the car off afterwards I raised the hood to towel up any water that might have settled under there and might drip down the exterior when next driven. Because this is like only the third or fourth time I have had the hood up, the first couple were battery related, I looked around a bit.

The battery sits on the left side up against the firewall, under the windshield, and to see it you have to lift a plastic flap. Well, there is another little plastic flap on the driver’s side too. Hmmm, I wonder what’s under there. I unsnapped the top and there was a small reservoir. Looks like it could be for windshield washer fluid. I unscrewed the cap and as I was lifting it off it slipped out of my hand and dropped down. It wasn’t for washer fluid, it was for brake fluid. This became obvious to me when I looked down to find where the cap was, it was tucked neatly underneath the brake booster.

In every other car I have owned or worked on this would not be a problem as the master cylinder and booster have been there in the wide wide open space in front of the firewall. In the Mini there is an enclosed area that runs along the whole firewall that hides the battery on the left and the brake componentry on the right. There was no way to retrieve the cap through the small opening of the flap, there was barely enough room to unscrew the cap.

The plastic cowl cover is in two pieces. The passenger side piece where the battery sits is about 1/3 long while the driver’s side piece covers the remaining 2/3. It tucks under the windshield at the back and at the front it snaps into the plastic front wall of the enclosure and a rubber gasket is pressed onto that to seal the elements out. This picture is not of the Ladybug, but it close enough to show what I’m talking about:

To get in there I needed to pull off the rubber seal, undo the two nuts that hold down the cowl on the driver’s side, separate the top plastic piece from the front one by pulling up hard to unsnap them, then squeeze my arm down in between to blindly poke around hoping to find the errant cap. There was just enough room to get in there, but not enough to get to where I needed. To do that I was going to have to remove the driver’s windshield wiper.

Try as I might it wouldn’t come free. So instead I pulled the passenger side of the cowl off hoping to free the left end so I could get just a little more room. That is when I discovered that the front plastic piece could be lifted off enough from the left side that I could actually slip my arm in to grab the cap. At this point I was bleeding in a couple of places on each arm from scratches with only one requiring a band aid.1

With the cap back on I was no longer swearing under my breath, and occasionally out loud, about selling the %#$!@% car. Then, when I went to reach for the 13mm socket wrench to put everything back together, I nudged the plastic case of the socket set just enough to knock it off it’s convenient resting place on the exhaust manifold shield and spill the entire contents into the engine bay. Double %#@$!

To be continued… in Part II