Masters Miata Club

Morning into Afternoon into Night


This morning started with a little event that I wrangled up from within the MMC. Something that started with a video a member posted on the Club site and another member mentioned to me that it would be cool if we could do something like that within the Club. We got all four generations of the Miata together and each one of the owners got to drive each others cars, so that when we were finished we had driven all four models.


This afternoon I started on some valances for the garage and finished about 9:00 PM tonight. A co-worker who does woodworking for fun and profit made the valances for me out of some 1/4″ plywood he had laying around earlier in the week. I started by painting the bare wood with some left over white paint and with Donna’s help picked out about a half dozen old maps to cover them with. She also helped me hang them because there was no way I could hold up a 5′ long valance and somehow reach both ends to screw them into the garage wall.

Tomorrow, the floor.

Masters Miata Club Photo Hunt/Road Rally

Donna and I read the rally instructions when they were first posted on the Club website. We then read them again last night when I printed out a copy for us to put on our clipboard. We were ready.

At the Rally start point we had 8 Miatas, seven that were going to “compete” and our Rally Masters David & Ellie Brock. There were 4 cars from the Masters Miata Club (Donna and I, Don & Kay Boltz, Teri & John Bozzarello and Mike & Shirley Dyer) and 3 cars from elsewhere who found out about the fun from Facebook. There was a couple from Asheville, one from the Atlanta area and a father/daughter pair from Lexington.

David asked for a volunteer that was familiar with Rallying to go first because even though they had rechecked the course just the day before, you never know, something could have changed and this way the first out could call back and some adjustment for mileage might be made. Seeing as Donna and I had done most every rally John and Jackie Nichols ever put on for the Club before, had done a couple put on by the Miata Club of America back when that organization existed and had even designed one for our Club back in the 90’s, we opted to go first. We were ready.

When we have run rallies in the past, because the real pressure is all on the navigator we have been swapping responsibilities back and forth, for this one I was going to navigate and she would drive. I snapped my smart phone into the Garmin GPS mount (go figure, it fit perfectly), attached it to the windshield and started the Google Driving App. We rolled to the start line and were handed the cue sheet:
1. Set trip odometer to zero.
2. [odometer and driver] (odometer must be legible)
3. N
4. R
5. “+”
6. L (Off course clue: T)
7. “2880”
8. L
9. Horse barn
10. R (Off course clue: T)
11. [navigator and fisherman]

Donna reset the trip odometer and then we had to be reminded by Ellie that the next thing we needed to do was take a picture (that’s what the bracketed phrases meant.) This should have been our first clue we might be just a little over confident about how ready we were. There was no time component, so we gathered ourselves and because Cue #3 was N, I told Donna to turn right out of Gregs Gas Plus and we were off. Cue #4 was R, so 100 yards later we turned right on Gregory Lake Road.

The next one was a plus followed by an L, so I said our next instruction is to look for a cross street and turn left on to it.1 After our left turn we started looking for the number 2880, but the house numbers were in the 1900s. It didn’t feel like the right road either, too narrow and the map showed it looped almost right back to Gregory Lake Road. We had traveled a mile and a half and were already off course.

We get back onto Gregory Lake and look for the next cross street. There it is, turn left and the first thing we see is a “look out for tractors” sign. Tractor, that starts with a T, does that mean we are still not on course? I tell Donna to press on. Maybe we’ll see 2880. We don’t, but the next cue is L so I instruct Donna to take the next left. And I start looking for a horse barn. We don’t see a barn by the time we get to a T in the road. Nice navigating Brian, where the heck are we?

I look a little further down the cues and see #11 and just know because of where we are and where we started the fisherman in the picture is the sign in front of Old McDonalds Fish Camp, so I tell Donna to turn right. She takes my picture in front of the sign. Alright, now we are cooking. From here I kept us on course by luck and familiarity with the area for the next couple of cues. But one too many critical words on Donna’s driving forced us to swap seats not long after we didn’t find the next required picture.2

With Donna now navigating we stayed on course for about the next 20 cues and gathered the next 4 photos before we missed a cue and actually hit one of the off course markers several miles down the road. Thankfully Cue #39 was a set of coordinates which we knew we could type into the Garmin GPS and find. This let us get the next picture, so we were starting feel good again. It didn’t last long though as we never found Cue #40, never saw the off course marker and drove and drove until we ended up in downtown Harlem, GA.

At this point we had now been on the road for 2 hours and had traveled around 75 miles and knew we were way off course. Reading through the rest of the cue sheet we saw numbers #52 [car and windmill] & #54 ‘continue to the Sonic Drive In’ and used our area knowledge to use the GPS to take us to the Sonic on Washington Road in Evans.

We were the 4th car to arrive at the ending spot. We ended up getting 7 of the 9 required photos and drove 94.8 miles instead of the 54.2 of a clean run, so I think the number 4 is probably the order we finished in too. The couple from Asheville nailed the thing getting all nine photos while traveling less than a mile more than a perfect run taking home a nice set of engraved glasses.

But how we did was secondary to having a beautiful sunny day to drive around on nice two lane back roads of the CSRA in a Miata. If the Brocks decide to do this again, in spite of the low Club turnout, we will be sure to be there and hopefully do better.

Peach Parade Pre-Breakfast & One Last Garage Floor Mockup


Today was the MMC’s annual trip to the Twin Lakes airport for breakfast before heading over to Trenton, SC to drive in the Peach Festival Parade. There were 8 Miata lined up in front of the Restaurant but only 6 drove the parade. There was one Club couple along for the drive, but had other obligations so the couldn’t stay. And one random Miata who is a local, and eats that the Airport Grill every Saturday, and we see him there every year. The parade participation seemed kind of light, but mostly is because they were calling for rain all week and it scared away a few groups, but we had a beautiful and a slightly quick parade drive. The crowds along the route seemed diminished too, but we still ran out of candy to toss for the last 50 yards…

I took a couple photos of the garage floor this morning so I could do a quick mock up of the proposed floor in the garage this morning. Not bad. We have some old light blue paint left over from a bathroom, so I may see about laying it over the crappy darker wood paneling on the wall with windows to spruce the place up more.


53,000 ng/dL of Testosterone

Better late than never. This post was supposed to written last weekend, but somehow I got on the write-about-bicycle kick and forgot it my drafts folder. Not that you are missing much as all it was was a CTBNL mileage update.

Last Saturday we drove up to Kershaw, SC to meet up with some other MMC members at the Carolina Motorsports Park. Club member John Haff is big in the NASA racing thing and he arranged for us fellow Miata owners to take some “parade” laps of the track during the lunch break. We of course turned that into a Motoring Challenge themed event as we needed a photo of a parade…

Somewhere, quite literally in the boondocks, the odometer clicked3 passed the 53,000 mark. I say literally, because we had just passed an intersection with a small country store on one corner that had “Boon Docks Store” painted on its outside wall.

Chasing Steeples Again

More or less repeat of my wrally wrap up over on the MMC website:

I don’t know what you were doing last Saturday, but we along with three other couples were enjoying what was basically a Division 1 college football tailgate party, interrupted by a six or seven horses whizzing by every half hour or so.

httpvh://youtu.be/S3JROluZ-_c

Not only did President Tom allow us the use of his rail-side parking spot, but he had a cake delivered to our tent that said “Happy Retirement Donna.” If Tom offers up his spot next year we’ll probably come again, we are not big horse racing fans, but it is a fun event to eat, chat and people watch. This year we hefty a few leftovers in our lunch sack, I threw the folding chairs over my shoulder and we walked the mile home unlike, last year where it took us over an hour just to drive the Miata for enough to get out side the venue’s gate.

Twenty Seventeen

Didn’t do real good on that though of writing on Wednesday did I? Well, I have a good excuse. After I got finished polishing this turd, I thought maybe I could do the same for the MMC’s website.

WordPress usually adds a nice shiny new template as an option with each major release of the software. They typically name it after the year of release, so the latest is called, unsurprisingly, Twenty Seventeen, an man is it cool. The page opens to a large image (or video if you are so inclined) and then you scroll down to the next page and there is an image to transition across to each new page. Check the demo page, then come back.

I downloaded a a program called InstantWP which allows you to install a portable version of your site on a USB stick. Not as simple as it sounded, I had to tweak a couple of PHP files to even get the Club’s large database loaded. When I finally got that sorted I fired up the web site. The side bar is on the right and we have it on the left, that was a project in itself. Countless internet pages later I got that sort of working. Several widgets didn’t work as they did before, but I thought maybe I could work around them or find substitutes.

But one of the widgets killed the whole deal, the calendar plugin that we rely on for event planning would not work at all. Sigh. I knew this day was coming, the plugin was last updated in 2009, but at least it still works on the current site. It is the next one that is really worrying, there will probably come a day when an update to WordPress itself will cause it to stop working. Look like finding a replacement might need to get moved to the front burner.