Month: February 2015

Who’s Your Caddy

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McTKSbG6Jrg

One of the destinations this year for the Motoring Challenge is “Location Filmed in Movie.” Our first thought was Heavy’s BBQ near Crawfordville, GA. It was used as the bar Stella’s Roadhouse in Sweet Home Alabama, but remembering our lousy meal we had there and it doesn’t look on the outside much like it did in the movie any more, we shot it down.

My next thought was the 1994 movie Nell because some of the scenes were filmed in Robbinsville, NC the gateway to the Tail of the Dragon. Any excuse to get to the mountains of western North Carolina & east Tennessee.

Thinking back closer to home, Disney remade the 1965 movie, That Darn Cat in Edgefield, SC just 25 miles up the road. The 1997 version of That Darn Cat starred Christina Ricci in the Haley Mills role and the production company painted practically every business building that fronted the town square.

Then I remembered there was a movie filmed even closer to home, because it was filmed right here in our Fair City, Aiken, SC. The cinematic masterpiece Who’s Your Caddy, that has a 6% score on Rotten Tomatoes, was the talk of the town back in 2007.

I was fully prepared to watch the whole movie just so I could find a recognizable Aiken landmark, but was spared the ignominy when within a minute and a half the hip hop moguls pull up to the clubhouse of the “Carolina Pines Golf & Polo Club” and it is The Wilcox, a historic Inn that was voted one of top 50 small hotel by readers of Condé Nast Traveler.

Now I just have to figure out how to get a half dozen stogy old white guys smoking cigars to be sitting in the white rocking chairs out front when I take the photo.

Car 54k Where Are You?

On the way to the Valve Store(tm), that is where. The Purple Whale needed just to travel 1 mile from our driveway to reach the 54,000 mile total and it happened this morning on the way to work.

I’ve been hanging on every word and photo of the next generation Miata. Our first 2 Miatas were 1st generation models. The first car we kept for 6 years and the second one stayed around for eight. The current car is a 2nd generation model and has been in the family for going on a dozen years. We thought we were going to get a 3rd generation model about 4 years ago, until we sat in and drove one. Neither of us liked the look, the bath tub like feeling and the fact that they stole passenger foot well room for routing of the exhaust. Plus, the couple of inches it did gain in all directions made it appear a lot larger than the previous versions of the car.

The 4th generation car is supposed to be smaller than the 3rd in a most areas and is actually shorter than the tiny first car, but you can’t tell it from the pictures below, it looks larger.


On the plus side I like the looks, except for those tail lights, and a leak of the Japanese market brochure shows that it will quite possibly be available in something called Dynamic Blue Mica. On the down side, I can’t imagine the “bath tub” feel has improved any from looking at the door height in those photos and I’ve read that the seat has been lowered in the car for more head room and improved balance. We will definitely go sit in and drive a 4th generation model later this year when they become available and even though right now I think I want one, odds are the reign of the Emperor will continue…

P0037

Lizard

Faulty Heated Oxygen Sensor (H2OS) Bank 1 Sensor 2

The nice young man at Advanced Auto down the street used his nifty OBDII scanner to read the code which caused the Check Engine light that short circuited our plans to drive the Emperor to Florida. The Miata is an inline 4 cylinder engine, so Bank 1 is the only possible option, Sensor 2 meant it is the downstream sensor, AKA the one after the catalytic converter.

I searched the Miata.net Forums for what this all meant for me. Sensor 2 just monitors the effectiveness of the cat and if you live in a non-Smog Check state it is not a real problem because the data is not used in changing any ignition parameters. You could just not fix it and leave the Check Engine light illuminated all the time, but the downside to that is you could throw another possibly important code and not know it. I’m going to be a good boy and fix it.

From reading the forum it seems like I might even be able to do the repair myself, so I ordered a new sensor from Parts Geek, $80 plus $9 for shipping. According to hive memory of the forum I’ll also need a O2 Sensor wrench to get this thing out, so I ordered one of them from Harbor Freight, $6 plus $7 for shipping.

Why, oh, why would I spend more for shipping than I did for the tool? The closest Harbor Freight is in Augusta and it would cost more in gas and aggravation to go get it when the postman will bring it right to my door. I suppose I could have borrowed one from a MMC member, but this way I’ll have the wrench when I need to replace the front sensor. Which would invariably have happened right after I returned the borrowed wrench.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1462

Good Morning Sunshine

Good Morning Sunshine

On our trip down to FLA we spent the night in Darien, GA right next to I-95, so come morning we could jump on the Interstate and get by Jacksonville before the commuters clogged the roadways. I set the alarm for 5:30 and double checked to make sure it was AM as I’ve mis-set that a few times in the past. Thursday morning we woke without the alarm at almost 7 o’clock. My alarm setting was spot on, but I failed to make sure the clock itself was set to the correct Meridian, Ante or Post. Actually the late start was not a problem as this put us passing around Jacksonville after the morning rush.

Friday night I set the alarm on the cell phone for 5:30 AM, because Donna wanted to be up to say goodbye to one of Sandy’s Seattle area friends before she headed to the airport to fly home. Saturday morning we woke with out the alarm at about 20 minutes after 6:00 AM. The alarm never went off because we keep the thing on silent so as to not bother us at an inopportune time, but unfortunately that also prevents it from waking us at the opportune one.

We’ll finish the trip home tomorrow, but for today we’ve stopped in Ocala because it is about halfway and we wanted to try and find the one geocache left not found in a local Conservation Area. About 4 this afternoon Donna wanted a nap, she said I could read if I wanted, but could I lay on the bed with her. I opted to shut my eyes for a bit too. Saturday afternoon we woke to the blaring of the hotel alarm clock at 5:30. Whoever was here last must have wanted it to go off at 5:30 PM. Or maybe they meant 5:30 AM and messed it up. Then again we stayed in this very same hotel back in November on a return trip Florida, maybe that someone was me.

53,000 Things It Could Be

Yesterday we filled up the Miata with gas. I came home and checked all the other owner serviceable fluid levels, they were all nominal. I washed the windows inside and out. We are headed down to Florida for the Celebration of Life for Sandy. The Miata was our transport of choice so we could score some more Motoring Challenge points.

One of the categories this year is Moss Motors Distributors. One point each for the first three and two points for numbers 4 & 5. There happens to be two of the distributors on the same street in Stuart which is the next town over from where we are going to be. Plus we had in mind a certain place just off I-75 in Micanopy, Florida for our Adult Playground Destination – Cafe Risqué!

After a few minutes creatively loading the trunk of the Emperor with probably more stuff than we really needed for a 4 day trip, I backed out of the garage and headed down the road. Three houses away I noticed a pretty orange symbol mid-dash that was unfamiliar…
check-engine-light_8D0206E867F895F0

Pulled over, shut the car off, then started it back up. The check engine light stayed on, so we u-turned back home. Unloaded everything from the trunk and cockpit, tossed it all in the respective places in the Sonata. Then added some more stuff, because we could, and got back on the road. Total lost time 5 minutes.

The light could mean any of 53,000 things could be wrong, from major to minor, but no sense taking any chances. I’ll get the code read at the corner auto parts store when we get back to see what it says. I have been watching all chatter about the new Miata over on the Miata Forum with a gleam in my eye recently, much the chagrin of the family CFO, and she even went so far as to suggest that this light might a subtle ploy towards getting one. She told me to forget about it, even if we need a whole engine, we’ll be getting that before we take up car payments again.

About 5 miles north of Statesboro, GA the Purple Whale passed through the 53,000 mile mark.

Beam Me Down Scotty

City - Bowman, SCAfter finishing up the graffiti photo shoot we continued on into Bowman, the home of the UFO Welcome Center. We visited (AKA drove by) the place when we were in Bowman taking post office pictures back in 2007. Knowing that a roadside attraction might be worth a point in the Motoring Challenge, we thought we might drive by again and get a photo.

Trouble was we didn’t have the location of the Welcome Center. I seemed to remember that it was like one street of the main drag. Bowman ain’t that big, how hard could it be? US178 runs through it northwest to southeast and SC210 is perpendicular to that. There are maybe 6 streets each, parallel to those roads.

We had covered about half of our search area when I noticed a big blue water tower with TOWN OF BOWMAN painted with what looked like a house painting roller. To add extra interest, the tower was home to an very large flock of turkey vultures. We still needed a town that began with the letter B, so…

We never really paid any attention to water towers before, but ever since we needed a picture of one for the Motoring Challenge we realized they are everywhere. This got my weird little mind thinking, maybe we should use a water tower that has the town name on it for all of the challenge requirements. Donna said that maybe I shouldn’t make this any more difficult than it already is. I’ll work on her, if we do this again in 2016 that will be how we do it.

After taking the water tower photo we headed out of town towards home, when out of the corner of her eye, Donna saw the Welcome Center. We circled back to get a photo, but after seeing the structure, decided against it. It was very dilapidated and looked like it might fall down any minute. Looking through the Google Images of the thing though, it appears to have been in this same state for a lot longer than that time frame.

I searched the Life of Brian for the photo I was sure we took during our first visit, but can’t seem to find it. Thinking on it now, I bet I didn’t take a photo in 2007 for the same reason I didn’t take one last weekend, that thing is ugly.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1461

Artistic Graffiti

Destination - Artistic Graffiti

What exactly constitutes Artistic Graffiti, I’ll leave that debate to the finer minds of the NY Times, for me it will be anything above a hastily painted gang marking on a stop sign.

I’m sure if we lived in a large city it would be easy to find something like that, but here in Our Fair (small) City it is really nowhere to be found. A search of the internet for “artistic graffiti Columbia”, the nearest decent sized town, resulted in nothing but mention of art shows with graffiti-like pieces for sale. Because we abhor going to the big cities of Charlotte or Atlanta there was no way we were going to make a pilgrimage there to drive aimlessly through their warehouse districts looking. This left happenstance.

And that is exactly what happened yesterday on our way home from the palindrome. We we zipping right along and had just passed over I-26 on SC210 heading to Bowman when we both noticed something bright blue off to the right. This prompted an immediate u-turn.

When GSV went through in May 2013, whatever the base of this wall was, was already gone, but it was unpainted…


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Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1460