Whine & Cheese: MINI Milestone & More

This past weekend I hit a milestone on the MINI... 10,000 miles!!!

WooHoo! And it only took approximately 21 months (unbelievably March will be the 2-year mark!), to get there... and we only got that far thanks to our big MINI-motivated 2,000 mile road-trip in August.

And to mark the historic occasion of the odometer reaching five-digits...

... I'm taking it back to the paint/body shop later today!!

Wah-Waaaaah! (insert Debbie Downer/raspberry sound)

As you may recall, at the close of my 40th birthday Vegas weekend extravaganza-palooza I found my Cooper vandalized... since then I've been half pissed off about having yet another thing happen to it and half pissed off about having to keep looking at it. (Oh, just in case I haven't mentioned it, car crap tends to piss me off)... so I finally decided just to get it all over and done with.

Since they did a great job in restoring it after the crash, I'm taking it back to the same paint/body shop it went to last year. At this point, I was going to give you a blow-by-blow account of setting up the appointment, etc. but it kinda pisses me off (have you detected a trend here?).... the bottom line is their customer service skills leave something to be desired... but again, it's the folks doing the physical work on my car that really matter... and there I am confident. I hope to have the car back by Christmas. (Don't ask, because it pis... ok, you know where I'm going!)

To return to happier MINI stuff... I've mentioned it once before... but just last week I got this typical cheeky/fun e-mail from MINI introducing their new SUV-ish MINI Clubman... it's set for a showroom floor debut early next year.

By sheer luck, I happened to catch a recent episode of Motorweek on PBS that had a segment about the Clubman (I do have a TiVo Wishlist for "MINI COOPER")... so I got to see it in action... and while I had my concerns about it, from what I saw it seemed to have all of the zippiness of its smaller sibling. It has a few additional inches here and there and, of course, it's higher... but not that much bigger than a Cooper... you can see the "club door" that helps folks into the back seat. So I imagine it is much smaller than I am thinking... a true mini-SUV by MINI.

I was a bit disappointed that there wasn't a Clubman at the Auto Show we went to over Thanksgiving weekend. I have seen photos of them at other car shows, but I guess Phoenix wasn't good enough.

My Cooper is going to need an oil change (a bonus/extra one... my first one was at the 1-year anniversary and this second one will be at the 10k-ish mileage mark) early next year... so maybe by then, there will be a Clubman for me to check out in-person on the showroom floor.