Year: 2022

46,000 Fruit Trees

Another 280 mile day consisting of The Dalles, OR to Monroe, WA and another day of more traffic than expected in a few spots. Don’t ask me about Sultan, WA…

We did manage to take a very pleasant and fun road from Yakima to Ellensburg. WA-821 runs right along the river through a canyon filled with 24 miles of sweeper turns and beautiful scenery.

If you have a hankering for Italian food you definitely can’t go wrong at the Ellensburg Pasta Company.

Just south of Yakima, while driving through thousands of apple and cherry trees the LadyBug ticked past its forty-six thousandth mile.

Small Road Trip

Off to the Great State of Washington. We are heading to the World Famous 4th of July Picnic of Les & Joanie Gilbert, something we haven’t been to for the past 5 years. Today’s leg was around 280 miles and for the first 100 and the last 80 of those miles it was smooth sailing, but the middle section from south of Bend to where US197 splits off was crowded, slow and quite a contrast to the end segments.

We did stop in downtown Bend for lunch and had a great meal at a place called The Point. We split an order of beer battered fish. But the real highlight was something that Donna saw on a chalk board inside, Fried Apples. It might have been advertised as a desert but we had it as an appetizer. The half dozen slices tasted like a sublime fried apple pie and were served with a caramel dipping sauce and some whipped cream.

For the fun of it and to break up the drive we snagged 3 Post Office photos. There were a couple more we were close to, but on a Friday their parking lots were too full to even find a spot to park in so that I could get car and Post Office in the same frame. We may try and stop at a couple few on the way home next Tuesday.

Gas Mileage

Monday’s drive was just to go fill up the Miata. We had 700 points (or 70 cents off a gallon) that expired in three days and we didn’t want to lose them. Stats: 198.6 miles traveled, 7.869 gallons at $4.879 per (instead of$5.579) for an average of 25.24 MPG.

For whatever reason this fill up was marred by the fact that the pump kept auto shutting off like the tank was full. After it happened the first time at 3 something gallons the poor guy had to just stand there and actually man the pump. He was hesitant to keep feeding the car fuel because he didn’t want to over fill the tank. I told him it should take about 8 gallons, so he just kept squeezing and waiting for it the shut off, repeating it numerous times, maybe five times until it got close to eight.

24.3 miles between drives on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday & Today
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 42

 

Sport, Off-Road, Touring

Its Summer Edition of SORT
As of Monday, June 27, 2022 at 6:00 PM pacific time:

Sport Off-Road Touring
1960 Ferrari 250 GT
Pinin Farina Coupe		 1982 Jeep CJ-7 4-Speed 1963 Volkswagen
Type 2 Panel Van
If this doesn’t just scream rich gentleman’s sports car I don’t know what does. Too bad I’m neither rich nor a gentleman. An interesting Lowes connection, but I’d replace the word Lowes in the side stripe with Brian because I’m a renegade. Had a ’63 panel van on Guam, shipped it back, but junked it in Tennessee. Wonder if this is it resurrected?

Here is what last week’s cars sold for, or bid to (if the reserve was not met):
Sports: 1974 Porsche 911 Sold for $97,500 on 6/22/22
Off-Road: 2021 Ford Bronco Bid to $76,121 on 6/22/22
Touring: 1991 Nissan Figaro Sold for $10,500 on 6/22/22

Busy Weekend

Today was both the big downtown show for the Kruise of Klamath and the Klamath Kinetic Challenge along the Link River Trail. I only took a few photos of the cars in downtown because it was hard to capture nice pictures of the cars as they were jammed in, in the intense sunlight or half in and half in deep shadow, plus lots of people.

Its summer so the Miata is getting a “workout. Last night we went over to Moore Park to see some of the cars from the Kruise for 11.1 miles and today we went 8.6 miles to downtown to see the car show and up to the lake to watch Kinetic fun.

Tomorrow we’ll probably take the Mini because the Kinetic folks do their water course just before lunch and by then it will be very warm out.

19.7 miles in the last two days.
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 38

 

Spatial Recognition Test

List the following items from the picture above in order of size from small to large:
Truck, SUV, shopping cart, Miata.

1.
2.
3.
4.

21.7 miles around town mopping up our weekly shopping.
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 37

 

81,000 Data Points

When we bought the CTBNL in August 2016 it had a little over 46,000 miles on the clock. Yesterday, June 2022, it hit the eighty-one thousand mile mark.

Because every time the Miata hits a comma and three zeroes mark I post about it and I add the tag “Miata Mileage” to it, so I decided to track down all those posts, get the dates it happened and create the nifty chart you see above.

I think I could have made it fancier in Microsoft Office, but all I have to use now is the free office program, LibreOffice, and I can’t figure out if it possible to get something nicer looking.

We are fast approaching 6 years of ownership and in the first 3 years we drove it almost 29,000 miles. Since then, in 5 years and 10 months the CTBNL has only added another 6,000 miles. There are a couple factors involved in this decrease of Miata mileage. First is that in the those beginning three years we were participating in those Moss Motoring Challenges, which caused us to drive around a lot locally and to take some long road trips. Secondly, we moved to Oregon where our convertible driving weather is in much shorter supply than it was in South Carolina.

17 miles on an evening drive last night & today’s pizza pick up run.
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 36