Motoring Challenge

32,000 + 73,000 = 8 Day Blogging Hole

Somewhere in the last eight days on one of Donna’s trip’s to the gym the Lady Bug passed the 32,000 mile mark.

This past Sunday afternoon on the way home from the South Carolina coast the CTBNL passed through the 73,000 mile mark.

In that same time frame we have taken 8 Motoring Challenge photos worth almost 20 points, but we missed out on the big one (a separate post that will happen sooner than eight days from now.)

Hey, Where Ya Been?

I’ve been here, just one part busy, one part watching TV and one part not feeling like writing anything.

Turns out I wasn’t the savior the Red Sox needed. I watched half a game on ESPN then listened to the other half a game and they lost. I listened to a game and they won. I didn’t listen to two games and they won one and lost the other. Since the last time I posted they have played .500 ball, which if that trend continues probably won’t get them in the playoffs, but it may keep them from finishing last.

I have been re-watching some of my favorite Marvel Cinematic Universe flicks. Not because I’m anxiously awaiting the next Avengers movie, but more because everyone is talking about them. There are a ton of lists online how to watch all of them in order to prepare yourself to watch Avengers: Endgame. There are 21 movies released so far and I was surprised to realize that I had copies of more than half of them. Growing up I was a fan of both the Iron Man and Captain America comic books, so I have the movies with those guys in the titles. I was a casual Thor reader too, so I have those three flicks. The first Ant Man movies struck the right cord with me, so I got the second one too. Never knew of the Guardians of the Galaxy but the first movie was fun, so I picked up the second one as well. I haven’t re-watched it yet and I may not because if I recall correctly I didn’t like it as much as the first. But then again, I am a sucker for origin stories and so far I have liked the first movie of the hero’s series more than any of the followups.

Not just watching movies either. I went back and re-binge watched Season 1 of Killing Eve because Season 2 started last Sunday night and I wanted to remember what went on. I also re-binge watched Season 1 of Fleabag because Season 2 is coming to America soon.

Add on top of that, Donna and I spent nearly 32 hours over 4 days this past weekend sitting on the screened porch watching golf on TV. Neither one of us golfs and we don’t watch it any other time of the year, but, because we have actually trod the hallowed grounds of Augusta National, every year for the first week of April we become fans and watch The Masters. Thank heaven for masters.com where you can watch practically the whole tournament commercial free. You just need to select “featured groups” and they follow 2 groups over the whole 18 holes and when they finish you get 2 more groupings.

We also managed to sneak in a couple of short Moss Motoring Challenge trips locally. We snagged 5 on Saturday morning and 3 yesterday afternoon.

72,000 Grains of Pine Pollen

I didn’t have an idea for how to use seventy two thousand in the title of this post, so I went back and looked to see what I used when the Emperor hit that mark over a little over 11 years ago: 72,000 Grains of Rice. Perfect.

Last Friday I washed both cars.

The Miata because it needed it. The other day I leaned into it to get something out of the center console and when I stood up there were dark smudges on the both thighs of my khaki hued jeans. Man, do silver colored cars hide road grime well.

The Mini because it needed it. When Donna got home from the gym on Thursday she complained because you could see of fine coating of about 72,000 pine pollen grains built up on the roof of the car. Man, does a gloss black roof show yellow pine pollen grains.

On our day trip Saturday to gather a few Moss Motoring Challenge points just outside Tennille, Georgia the CTBNL passed through the 72,000 mile mark.

Cocktail Weenie?

A couple of weeks ago we drove over to Atlanta, GA (approx. 300 mile round trip) and spent the night in a motel to take a picture of the Miata with a Wienermobile to score 9 points in this year’s Moss Motoring Challenge.

Now, for next weekend, we are considering driving to Gainesville, FL (more than 300 miles one way) and spending a night in a motel to take a picture of the Mini Wienermobile which is worth zero points in this year’s Moss Motoring Challenge.

Seeing as it is worth zero points, if we go, what should we drive? The Mini, to take a picture with it and the Wienermobile made from a Mini. Or should we drive the Miata, just to have a photo of it with both sizes of Wienermobiles.

Hot Dog!

In this year’s Motoring Challenge the two big point earners, worth nine each, are the Wienermobile and a Blimp.

Getting a handle on the Wienermobile location is supposed to be easy, just download the app and you can find out where any of the 6 vehicles will be on a given day. There were early rumbling on the Moss Motoring group Facebook page that the app was way wrong and a couple of folks showed up only to not see a Wienermobile. Didn’t matter to me because when I first tried to load the app on my phone, the Google Play store wouldn’t let me, it told me my device was incompatible.

I heard Twitter was supposed to be the way to go while they fixed the app, but the information I found was somewhat incomplete. It gave a date and city, but not an actual location. And it only went out so far and then when that date passed, it never posted another schedule. I tried to create a Google news feed that tracked mention of the Wienermobile, but that usually resulted in getting a story once it had been and gone somewhere.

Guessing it was going to be in Atlanta on Superbowl Weekend, I checked the Atlanta paper online and found out it actually would be there and it listed specific locations. So we made plans to drive over and back the Saturday before, but in end the weather was supposed to be rainy and we hate driving in Atlanta, so we didn’t go. There is one of the Wienermobiles assigned to the southeast region, so we knew we would find it someplace eventually.

Last week I learned that the app was supposedly fixed. I tried again to load it my phone, but it still wouldn’t. So I found a place I could download the APK file and side-loaded it to the phone. Lookie there, the Wienermobile was going to be in Atlanta again this weekend. This time it was going to be in the eastern suburbs, so we wouldn’t have to venture inside the I-285 beltway, AKA The Danger Zone. On Sunday it was going to be at two different Walmarts in Lithonia.

We still had enough points left for one more free room at a Holiday Inn Express, so on Saturday afternoon we tossed a change of clothes in a bag and drove over to a town one further west of where we needed to be on Sunday morning. In the morning when I looked in on Twitter to see if anyone had posted pictures from the event the day before, I was shocked to see that a Wienermobile was at the Daytona 500 in Florida. Knowing they were assigned to regions and the flaky app postings, I wasn’t real confident that our goal would not be waiting for us in the Lithonia Walmart parking lot.

As you can see above, there was a Wienermobile where the app said it would be. Turns out the southeast region Wienermobile was in Daytona, but this one was from the midwest region. I didn’t think to ask them why they were down south. Donna and I chatted with the two “Hotdoggers” for a bit and I think they were happy for the company because at nine o’clock on a chilly, misty Sunday morning there weren’t a lot of visitors. By 9:30 we were back on I-20 heading home nine points richer.

One down and one to go. Now, where is that confounded blimp?

Portmanteau

This year’s Moss Motoring Challenge has a very clever and sometimes hard to capture category called “Writer’s Road Block (signs or scenes)”
Action verb – 1 pt
Alliteration – 1 pt
Anagram – 4 pts
Assonance – 3 pts
Conflict – 2 pts
Foreshadowing – 5 pts
Malapropism – 4 pts
Metaphor – 1 pt
Needs Editing – 3 pts
Oxymoron – 3 pts
Portmanteau – 3 pts
Simile – 1 pt

The above is a portmanteau: word that is a linguistic blend of words, in which parts of multiple words or their phones (sounds) are combined into a new word, as in smog, coined by blending smoke and fog, or motel, from motor and hotel.

Georgialina = Georgia + Carolina

Brushed Stainless Steel Dash

Stainless Steel Gauge Surround

On the 25th of January, they announced the winners of the 2018 Moss Motoring Challenge and mailed off the $50 Gift Certificates. As expected, we landed in among the top 50 runners-up at the totally respectable level of tied for 8th. Our Gift Certificate arrived on Monday the 28th, on Tuesday I ordered the goodie you see above and it arrived today. A couple hours later and it was in.

We took advantage of mild weather this afternoon and took a drive to do a little work towards another $50 Gift Certificate next year. We snagged 3 photos to go along with the 2 we already have giving us a total of 15 points out of a possible 298.