Whine & Cheese

MINI Clubman In-Person

Time flies... hard to believe this time last week I was up at the MINI dealership getting what has become my my annual oil change... this was supposed to be a "bonus" oil change since I had just now ticked past the 10,000 mile mark ... but since it also coincided with the one-year mark since my last oil change... well, no bonus!   I also had my airbag light repaired and an brake fluid flush... all of this "free" under my warranty...

Alas they weren't going to let me leave without earning some $$$... so they recommended a tire rotation and an alignment...  which were "voluntary" and thus brought charges.  I could hardly argue... I know these things should be done every so often and why not reward my Cooper with a little extra lovin' since it just turned 2 years old... and I guess they honeymoon is officially over since I allowed that birthday party to go by unnoticed on March 9th.   

One thing I was looking forward to my trip to dealership (besides meeting up w/ my old work friend) was checking out the new MINI Clubman.  I received an e-mail from the dealership in February that they had arrived... so I was anxious to see them in-person.  Here are a few pix:

Basically, it's a stretched out MINI... it's almost like you took a Cooper and taffy-pulled the back of it out just enough that it's noticeably longer.  I just took a good look at these pix this morning and I see I failed to get a good picture of the "club door" (duh!!), but you can sorta kinda see it in that first pic... where folks have that extra slim door (only on the passenger side) to get in the back seat.

The Clubman will still have to grow on me a bit more... I am certainly no car aficionado, so it didn't really seem all that different from a Cooper to me... so not quite sure how much of a cost/benefit there is to the "extra" space... but still a cool car... but it will certainly cause me confusion.  I have this tendency to yell out "Cooper!" (according to a certain somebody, in an autistic manner) whenever I see a MINI... so I'm am going to have to start looking closer to see if it's a Clubman instead.

Same Sh&t, Different Year: 2008 Edition

Hey!  Welcome to W&C v2008 and Happy New Year!

I used the same phrasing in the first post of last year and figured it was good enough to recycle... though thankfully a different tone (less "whine")... and while I probably should be announcing some profound change of course for myself and/or this blog, it ain't happenin'!  Like I said, just more of the same stuff you've grown to love (or hate) these past several years.

I have a lot of "blog material" zipping through my mind, but I think I will just focus and tell you about a couple of them and save the rest for a "rainy day"... and if it doesn't end up getting told, it probably wasn't worth my effort and your time anyhow!

First off, our New Year's!  More whimper, than bang to end the year... but on purpose and "okay."  We did something different this year, we slept our way into the new year!   Allow me to back up.  Upon his return from visiting family, Todd came home with a stomach flu bug.  On the way back, he text'd me that he was not feeling well... and, sure enough, I didn't see all that much of him when he did get in on Saturday night... and we'll just leave it at that.  While he was feeling better on New Year's Eve, he was still cautious about eating and there was definitely no drinking (of alcohol, that is). 

We watched what had to be the gayest thing on television for the night ... the East Coast/Times Square live television celebration... on... wait for it... CNN!   Yes, CNN.  Not only Anderson "Andy" Cooper anchoring... but special co-host, Kathy Griffin... and (!!) with regular visits via satellite to the Annual Midnight Drag Queen drop at Key West, Florida.  Kathy was on fire... though I am guessing she was the first to ponder how she landed that decidedly non-D List gig.

We were pretty much done with that celebration at 10:30pm our time.  At a loss of what to do next, not a whole lot interesting on TV, and both of us kinda zapped... we figured, what they heck... let's just go to bed!   Ironically and oddly enough, it was me who was out like a light and the recovering Todd who was likely still awake at our midnight (at 11:40pm, he told himself he wasn't going to look at the clock again).

So there you have it... New Year's Non-Rockin' Eve... and absolutely no regrets!

Well, I planned to switch to another topic here... but my long-winded tendencies apparently haven't curbed themselves in '08 (as I said... same sh&t, different year!)... so come back late for some more... eye candy, too!

Oh, one quick topic-shift/small thing!   I did get the MINI Cooper back on Monday/New Year's Eve.  The $1600-worth of a scratch is now a memory and all looks "good as new"... again!  I told the body/paint shop customer rep person that while I think they do great work, I hope never to see them again.

I was thankful that Cooper didn't have to spend one day more there and spillover into the new year.  I hadn't made (nor do I typically) a New Year's resolution... but here's one I will do my very best to keep... after 49 days in 2006 and 20 days in 2007....

No body or paint shop visits in 2008!!

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.

Scratch & Sniff(le)

I mentioned another MINI Cooper drama in yesterday's post...

I have to say for a car that has brought me so much happiness, it has also brought its fair share of misery too.   Barring a dead battery (or two), my two previous cars over 15 years were pretty incident free... but not even two years with my Cooper we've had the windshield ding, the accident, the "get stuck in the middle of nowhere in 107 degree weather because they did something wrong when fixing the car" incident, the out-of-state speeding ticket (which btw is resolved... but took a lot of time, worry, effort and $$$ for what the actual ticket fee ended up being)... and now we add another chapter...

As we headed back to the Cooper for our drive home from Vegas, my Cooper had been "keyed" (I think that's the term for it)... the scratch started at my driver's side door and continued all along the side with, the above pictured, final swipe at the back of the car (aka "the boot").

Yesterday, I mentioned that I didn't think it was all that bad... however, that was before my trip to the body/paint shop for an estimate.  I guess it depends on your definition of what "bad" is... but I don't think it qualifies as "good" that I now have a $1600 scratch... that is going to have my Cooper back in the shop for 7 business days.

Needless to say, I am pissed.  While I would have been ticked over say a door ding, at least that seems like something that "happens"... but having the car being deliberately vandalized is just infuriating.  I have heard that Coopers have been "targets" (of course, I read that after I ordered mine!), so I guess now I know firsthand!

But this won't stop me from driving to car to certain places... that only emboldens the enemy, those who hate my freedom to drive and park my Cooper wherever I damn want!

While my parents think a perpetual black cloud follows them around, I try to maintain a more positive view... however even I am starting to think "What the frick next with this car?!"

One More For The Road

All the vacation/road trip pix are finally posted!   

Man, that was almost as tiring as all that driving!   Ok, not really... but it took awhile to "narrow" it down to 119 "better" photos... and here is another one of them!

This is on the famed Million Dollar Highway between Ouray and Silverton... how it got its name is disputed, some say it cost $1 million dollars per mile (in the 1920s!) to it containing $1 million in gold ore... nevertheless, the views are priceless.  What you are seeing is a two-lane highway for both north and southbound traffic... yes, oncoming cars will be on that outer edge... and, not sure if you can sense it... but I would be very surprised if a slip off the road would be survivable! 

For those of living in the "city," it is often hard to imagine all the wide open spaces there are in this country.  Heck, I probably didn't realize it until I ventured off the East Coast at nearly 20-ish years old.   

In particular, on this road trip, it was just staggering to think of all the labor and ingenuity that it took to create these roads -- especially without the technology of today -- and in such remote locals and what had to be some extreme weather conditions.  I often sighed as I would round a corner and see how far we still had to go on a highway... but only to imagine what it felt like to those who were building it decades and decades ago!!

Besides, the roads... you look around... again it is just unfathomable that every light pole, every fence post, every electrical tower, every railroad track was put down by someone!

Okay, one last plug for my photos... choose your degree of interest:

All My Flickr Pix

The Complete Road Trip Flickr Set

The 2007 MINIs in the Mountains "Only" Set (included in the above)

Have a nice weekend... and we'll return to our non-travel obsessed blog entries next week!

Deep in Flickr-ville

Since I thankfully haven't returned to a work-related sh&t-storm, I am taking advantage of the time and uploading our Road Trip pix to Flickr... so I am pretty much blogging over there today!

As of this very moment, I have uploaded about 70 of 246 pics... and still have about 227 more pix to weed through!  I am trying to be selective... but what's killing me is coming up with titles and descriptions. 

After an hour+ of doing it, my mushed brain ends up giving this picture a title like... "Pretty"

So while it is very much "in progress" if you want to see what I am up to today... head on over to my Flickr page. 

I am done (!!!) uploading pictures from the MINIs in the Mountains weekend and created a special MitM set just for that.

All the pics (including MitM), are going into a 2007 Road Trip set... so far the above picture is my "official" photo for this set (between Silverthorne and Kremmling, on the way to Steamboat Springs... and snapped by Todd!)... pretty stunning (and albeit typical!) Colorado Rockies scenery.

I am not sure if I will get through all the pix today... but I should get pretty close.

Rocky Mountain Highs (And A Low)

We made it back into town late yesterday afternoon... the 9+ hour drive was a killer... the one on the way out wasn't so bad, but I guess that's how you tell whether you are at the start or end of a vacation.  Pretty beat this morning, so I will try to give you the "cliff notes" version of our week and probably fill in some details later. 

Looks like I have 472 pictures to go through!   We downloaded and viewed most of the them during the trip since Todd has his work laptop (which he thankfully didn't have to use for those purposes while we were away, though I am sure he is feeling the brunt this morning)... so I know there are some real nice ones... while I appreciate compliments on my pictures (though Todd took a lot of them while I was driving), thanks to the scenery its pretty impossible to not take a good picture.  Thank goodness for digital, because I doubt we would have so much to look at/sort through if it was the load film, old school camera!

Okay, let's see how quick I can do this!   Since I hate to end on a bad note, let's start with...

The Low:  Our trip ended under a bit of a dark cloud.  On Monday, Todd got a speeding ticket while we were out on a spontaneous afternoon drive.  Felt a bit guilty, since I told him he had to drive back and have some fun on this wonderfully twisty highway.  Long story, short(er)... he got clocked going twice the speed limit in a 25mph zone... sounds bad I know, but we still find it hard to believe... since due to the nature of the twists in the road won't let you go that fast (and it wasn't going through a town, school zone, etc)... there is a lot of altitude changes... and even more frequent changes in the speed limits...and needless to say we had never driven the road before... so we feel we kind of fell into a popular out-of-stater trap... worse of all, the police officer didn't cut any slack... a few hundred dollars... nope, a court summons for next month... in a town that is over 10+ hour drive away from Phoenix and even a 5+ hour drive from Denver.  The "alternative" to (pardon the pun) speed up the process was to get arrested... so just a big 'ole mess, that hopefully will be able to be resolved without making a return trip to CO.

Okay, onto the good stuff!

Mileage: Pulled out the garage with 5672 miles last Wednesday morning... pulled in with 8092 yesterday (Tuesday) afternoon... so for the arithmetically challenged that's 2420 miles tacked on in under a week!

Santa Fe:  A return to one of our favorite vacation spots of the past... didn't have much time with just one night in town... but we managed a nice dinner at a local favorite Horseman's Haven... walked around the Plaza after dinner (which was very much abuzz with lots of folks and free live music... on a Wednesday night!)... and once again had the best ever huevos rancheros at another local favorite, Tortilla Flats, on Thursday morning.

Denver:  Again, just one night... stayed at the very nice Magnolia Hotel in downtwon... when I booked the room, I decided to go for a suite...  while a tad pricey, it was huge and we really made us feel all schmancy.  Quite impressed with downtown Denver.  Mix of historic buildings and the "new,"  a wonderful pedestrian-only street of shops and restaurants, sport, concert and theater venues all walkable distances, heavily used public transit (including light rail)... I would say Phoenix could only wish for the same... granted we do have a lot of the same things, but in Denver it just seemed like people were around in their downtown!  Also, had a good time at the Rockies/Cubs game at Coors Field... at least know we know that Phoenix isn't the only ballpark where Cub fans outnumber and out-cheer the "home team."

MITM:  That's MINIs in The Mountains... the centerpiece event our vacation... with nearly 200 Coopers from all over the country in attendance.   Seeing another MINI is usually a rare occurrence, so it was blast just to see them everywhere!   We drove around most of Friday & Saturday on runs with other MINIs... first up to Mt. Evans, driving up the highest paved road in North America... over 14,000 feet... at the top it was in the 47 degrees and hailing... can't say we've ever experienced that kind of weather in August!   Saturday turned into a very nice, but nearly all-day run, with stops in Steamboat Springs and Vail.

Telluride:  As mentioned, in my special live report from a couple of days ago... we really loved Telluride.  It has a reputation of being snobbish and high-brow (Oprah and Tom Cruise are among its part-time residents)... but we certainly didn't see much evidence of that, even walking by a 1,200 sq. ft. "fixer-upper" house selling for $1.895 million... food prices were pretty affordable... very much a small town feel with very friendly folks... we did splurge staying at The Hotel Telluride, it was one of the places where you felt you were getting what you paid for... for the most part.

As I did with the NJ/NYC trip, it is probably more palatable to share the trip via pictures... so I'll let you know when good chunks of photos are available for public viewing!

What Would Jesus Drive?

Hopefully, we have survived and thoroughly enjoyed our MINIs in the Mountains weekend and find ourselves relaxing in Telluride today.

Continuing in the MINI spirit, have some more fun MINI pix for you today. 

The first one, once again comes via one of my friends (thanks to recently returned from summer hiatus Scott!)... this piece over at AutoBlog... Miracle Car? Look, it's the Jesus MINI!

Magic or miracle?  Neither, just a bit of ingenuity and the hyper-active imagination of the folks at MINI.  I read (I think!) from an eye witness over on the Flickr MINI Cooper Group that it's the shell of a Cooper over a jetski.  Pretty cool, huh?

The next picture, I suspect is also just a shell of a Cooper!  This one I took myself earlier this summer (late June 2007)... just north of Times Square at the corner of Broadway/49th Street.

Hopefully we'll be "traveling at the speed of awesome" tomorrow as we make the long trip home! 

MINI on Steroids?

If all is going to plan, we should have left Denver this morning on our way to Copper Mountain and MINIs In The Mountains.

So today, I figured it only made sense to do a MINI post.  Take a look at this?  At quick glance, it looks like just another MINI (if there is such a thing!)... but look closer... something seems a bit different...

Meet the 2008 MINI Clubman!  If a MINI Cooper is... well, too mini... for you, perhaps this SUV version of it will fit the bill. 

Honestly, I am not to sure what to think about it.  Part of the charm of the MINI is its size, its race car/go-kart history, and that Euro small car feel... so this seems just slightly wrong to me... heck, I'm not even that fond of the Toyota FJ Cruiser which I think is too Cooper-esque with its bright-colored body/white roof combo.  So who knows, the Clubman is kinda cool... so it will probably grow on me... maybe.

Thanks to Jeff for leading me to the Clubman article (click to read and see more about it).  While you think I must eat, drink, and sleep all things MINI... more often it is my fellow blogging friends who pass these things along to me!

Have a nice weekend... hopefully we're having some good weather to motor around the Rockies and across the Continental Divide!

Wacky Weekend Weather

This is officially a sign that I am turning into my parents... a post about the weather!  Though I am guessing I am not alone in this department... while there are exceptions, I think one's fixation with The Weather Channel is correlated with age.

Anyhow, on Saturday we took a trip down to Tucson to take Todd's Dad out to lunch for his birthday... like my Mom, it was a the big 7-0.  Earlier in the week, he had called Todd to let him know that if the weather is bad that we should not come down.  Needless to say, we woke up to clear skies and abundant sunshine and were on the road shortly after 9am.

We took the Cooper.  With our Cooper-centric vacation rapidly approaching, I was torn between wanting to give it a good highway "test" run prior to our big road trip... but even well over a year since the accident, I still suffer from bouts of paranoia... nothing bad an happen to my car in the near future... as you can probably guess, it is a pretty important to have a Cooper at a huge gathering of MINIs! 

But no worries... the Cooper is just fine... but there were some dicey moments.

This is our stormy time of year... our monsoon (or haboob) season... bad weather crops up quickly and unpredictably.  While were in Tucson, the skies were fairly ominous... but the proverbial "bark with no bite"... and just a bit of rain as we hit I-10 for the late afternoon trip back home.

So long story short(er), it didn't take long before we hit into some heavier rain... again, not too bad if anything it was nice to see that my rain-sensitive automatic windshield wipers work!   But soon there is a huge plume of dust ahead and that's got me concerned.  The worst weather situation I faced in the Cooper was a quick duststorm on the way to our favorite Indian casino last summer... but fortunately, when we reach it, there is only minor reduced visibility.

10 minutes or so later, there is another cloud of dust ... and this one is bad.  It seems that in a blink of an eye, the dust is so bad that the cars in front us literally disappear into the storm. 

I immediately pull off the road and join a few other cars that have done the same... within minutes, more and more cars are pulling off... so many that I am concerned we are going to get hit by someone pulling off and not realizing home many of us there are... plus there are a bunch of cars merely on the shoulder (vs. all the way off the road)... plus my heart was in my stomach as cars (and 18-wheelers!) didn't slow down all that much heading into the dust cloud... plus pulled over cars not observing the recommend "lights off"  duststorm rule.... since moving cars would generally be following lights... on top of that, both cars continuing to drive on and those pulled have their hazard lights blinking... so very confusing (and pretty nerve wracking) with the low visibility and decreased depth perception. 

We were able to get back driving 20-25 minutes later, with visibility still not quite ideal, but it cleared up enough a few miles up the road... we hit into some heavy rain again, but "anything but dust" was good enough for me.    

Todd was hoping to mow the grass when we got home.  Despite all this bad weather, it appeared that as we approached the very southern edge of Phoenix Metro area was pretty clear.  Alas, we had a downpour the exit right before ours... so the window of opportunity to mow seemed to seemed to slam shut!

Or not... a mere five minute drive from that rain-soaked spot and back at our house, nary a drop of rain and the grass dry enough to mow. 

Go figure, but that's the hit-and-miss summertime weather here in Arizona!