Road Trip

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.

$20,000 In Legal Fees


Day 1 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Aiken, SC to Birmingham, AL. In our continuing effort of never having to drive in Atlanta, our first day’s drive across Georgia included a back road route that took us more than 30 miles south of that megalopolis. We were barreling along GA16 about 10 miles west of Monticello when we blew by a convenience store with the rather odd name of Sack-O-Suds. I thought to myself that it sounded familiar. Then it hit me, the movie My Cousin Vinny. This was the place that our two “heroes” shoplift a can of tuna from and it lands them in jail for murder. By now we are a couple miles down the road and I think to myself out loud, “Should have taken a picture.” My co-pilot says, “Well, turn around.”

Not too far from crossing into Alabama the Lady Bug flies past the 20,000 mile mark.

Mr. Meniere Makes A Visit

Sunday morning I woke up at 5:30. I was lying on my side facing the alarm clock and when I opened my eyes the image I saw spun quickly up and repeated and repeated and repeated…so I blinked a couple times, but it wouldn’t stop. I closed my eyes and decided that maybe if I rolled onto my back that would help. Trouble came about when I started to roll over I opened my eyes! I can only equate the visuals to what I imagine is a portion of a potent LSD trip. Once on my back the ceiling fan was scanning across my vision rapidly from left to right.

I closed my eyes and lay there for a few minutes contemplating. I knew what it was, it was the one symptom of Meniere’s Disease that I hadn’t suffered from back in September — vertigo. With experimentation I found that I could make it stop by jamming my eyeballs all the way to the right (direction everything was spinning.) I then woke Donna and told her what was happening. She wanted to know what we should do and I told her the first thing was I needed to go to the bathroom. Using a combination of eyes closed, eyes opened hard to the right and her supporting me, mission accomplished.

It was still early, so I suggested let’s go back to bed and see where we are when we next wake up. I woke up again at 7:30 and I was lying on my side facing the alarm clock. When I opened my eyes the image was perfectly still. I blinked my eyes a couple of times, normal. I closed them for a minute or so and opened back up to the return of ordinary. There hasn’t been a return of the dizziness since.

I’ve given up caffeine as the doctor suggested, so was it the small coffee in the morning and the 20oz. Dr. Pepper in the evening on Saturday? Was it the 300 mile road trip, more than half of it with the top down that brought it on? The pizza in Milledgeville? The glass of wine with dinner? Not getting a lot of sleep two nights before? Watching the synchronized drones of the Olympic’s Closing Ceremony?

Let’s Take A(nother) Drive


So yesterday morning we drove to Columbia in the Mini, essentially a one hundred twenty mile round trip for breakfast. Some people might question this method of purchasing the most important meal of the day, but we could think of no finer way to spend 3 hours on a lovely fall Saturday.

On second thought, we could.

So after a lunch at Subway here in Aiken yesterday, we filled up the Miata, dropped the top and drove to Greenwood, about 60 miles away, to take a photo of a train locomotive. Not just any locomotive, but one worth 10 points in the Moss Motoring Challenge in the category “117 Years of Transportation.” Before we took this drive we still needed 4 of the 12 photos, the decades of 1900, 1910, 1950 & 1980.

On our way into Greenwood I got a fleeting glimpse of a car repair place that had a very interesting old truck parked outside. Because we were going to go back out of town the same way we were coming in I didn’t pull an immediate u-turn. The shop was further back than I thought though and I was just beginning to worry I had imagined it, when it popped up on the left.

The 111-year old train was the big prize, but this auto repair was a nice prize in it’s own right. That old truck was a 1954 or 1955 Chevy 3100 pick up. And in the back was our 1980’s point just sitting there, a nicely preserved Pontiac Fiero. Before we had headed north we cut through a local golf course neighborhood to get a photo for our last point in the “Around the World” category.

58,000 Perferations

Our recent seven-day trip in the CTBNL was the first big road trip we have taken in it since we bought it last year. When we got home both of us commented how the seats in the car didn’t seem as comfortable as the ones in the Emperor. They are the same seats in both cars except the Emperor’s seats were covered in tan leather with about 58,000 perforations in the center sections instead of the black cloth of the CTBNL.

The only thing I can think of that would make that much difference between cloth & leather is stick-a-tude. In the cloth seats, you plunk your butt down and that is pretty much where you stay. This which is why the autocross guys love ’em, you don’t slide around a lot in the turns. With the leather, there is just enough slippage that after a few minutes of driving your butt self-centers in its most comfortable position.

So, we have (re)started to explore getting leather upholstery.

At an MMC Bug Splat event a few years ago, there was a couple in the club who had recently had their seats recovered in leather at a local shop and were showing them off. Because at that time the leather seats in the Emperor were getting tired looking and worn in spots, we had been considering that same job. We oohed and aahed appropriately as both Donna and I thought it looked really nice. When we asked how much it cost, it sounded expensive ($1200), so we tabled the idea and decided to think of the wear on our seats as patina1, not a defect.

That four-figure price above included installation and the hive mind that is the Miata.net Forums say it is a do-it-yourself job. I’ve looked at a couple of guides on there and it is possibly doable even for me, but it will probably take me not the 8 hours claimed, but a whole weekend to do the job. That same wisdom recommends either LeatherSeating.com or Katzkin as the quality leather upholstery to buy. The price (shipped) direct from LeatherSeating is $750. The Katzkins are only sold through re-sellers and there is only one vendor on the forum shopping page that sells them, GoMiata, and a set shipped from them is $670. Either way I’ll still need another $30 for hog-ring pliers and the rings. Coming up with the $700 free dollars won’t be the hardest part about re-upholstering the seats though, it will be setting aside a full weekend of not driving the Miata…

On the way back from Columbia on Saturday the CTBNL passed the 58,000 mile plateau.