Sunday Drive

A bit delayed, but here’s my report of a pleasant Sunday drive this past weekend. Sorry for the delay, but my photo-editing software was broken. Namely the “Save for web” feature, which makes nice reasonably-sized JPEG files would not work for me. A few calls to Adobe Tech Support revealed to me that their programmers are complete idiots. It seems that unless you are logged into your Macintosh in an account with “administrator” levels of privilege certain features will not work… huh? I’ll let my friend John (John, you should add a whole “adobe” category on your site… I’d link to it!) continue to beat on them about such insanity as he’s so much better than I about those things. Too bad Tim Gill never shipped his “Photoshop killer” back in the day. Sigh… when you would trade Quark for Adobe you KNOW things have gotten bad!

(Click “More” to see the rest.)

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Sunday dawned clear and cold, unlike the foggy day before. I decided I had to get the Jaguar out for a drive. Just a quick jaunt up the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River towards Darrington, and back. Far enough to get the Jaguar warmed up and running, but not anything like a long drive. This is my usual “quick jog” drive. The scenery is very pretty up this road too: MT Higgins, a glimpse of Glacier Peak, Whitehorse Mountain, Mt. Bullen, and Three Fingers.

Above: GOES image of the state on Sunday morning. Clear!

This is truly our first actual clear day of 2009, and more importantly the first clear day we’ve had since early November. Gotta take advantage!

Sue’s son Adam is living with us temporarily and he’s never ridden in the E-type so once he was up we piled in and took off. Actually as he was eating breakfast I gave the car a good look-over, checking fluids and whatnot. It started on the second try, always a good sign. I had hoped to get some timelapse footage of the drive but could not get my setup going so rather than futz with it I just put it away and left it behind. The roads were still a tad wet from the fog overnight, and even had a bit of ice here and there. Several times the rear of the Jaguar broke loose under even slight acceleration, so I ended up keeping it pretty mild for the drive, with careful use of the throttle in shady spots and corners.

Above: Sunny… but COLD.

We headed north, along Jim Creek road, down to Trafton on the river, then east towards Darrington, with a diversion along the Oso Loop Road, and out to my usual turnaround spot under Whitehorse Mountain. There I stopped for some photos (despite the brutally low sun just over the summit of Whitehorse, making for a backlit background and lens flares galore) and some more looking over of the car.

Above: My new “Collector Vehicle” plate. No more “65E” vanity plate, but also no more tabs or renewals. 71100…. The Upside Down Tin Man first meeting Dorothy!

The car was running VERY cool – a combination of the very low ambient temps and a too-efficient radiator. I decided to blank off a bit of the radiator with duct tape, hoping to get the coolant up to a more standard temp of ~50-70° C. Up till now the temp gauge had barely gone beyond 30°C.

From here, our easternmost point we headed back west, stopping at the Shell station near Swede Heaven Road for a snack. There was still huge amounts of snow here up the valley. They must have seen much more than we did, just a few miles west.

Above: The Jaguar looked truly diminutive among the Pickups and SUVs here. It attracted plenty of attention from the locals though.

Continuing east the car was now running right where it should be, around 50-60°C. It felt great to be driving the E-type again. The wonderful exhaust note. The feel of the wheel. But it reminded me of the things I have to do to keep it in fine form. I still need to fix my wobbly steering column (replace a bushing), lubricate my IRS (quell some squeaking), and finally sort out my cooling fan. The latter issue came to my attention when I turned off to climb up to Lake Cavanaugh. This lake, as you can see in the “terrain” map above is something of a “hanging lake” .. that is it sits in an unusual cirque well above the valley floor. As the wall going up to it faces south I wasn’t worried about snow, but as it climbs 1000 feet in less than 2 miles the grade is steep. I noted the temp gauge rising fast as we neared the top. I pulled over and shut down the engine. Last year I had wired the fan to a switch on the dash, which I engaged as we started the climb. It obviously wasn’t working! I pulled off the duct tape, and futzed with my wiring hack while the car cooled down (not a hard thing to do in the ambient temperature.)

Above: The car, sitting near our high point on the climb to Lake Cavanaugh, cooling off.

Above: Looking west down the Stilly Valley from the above spot, towards Arlington, the Puget Sound, and the distant Olympic Mountains.

I had planned to continue around the lake and take the roads down through the big Pilchuck Tree Farm on the other side to SR 9 and back to Arlington. Instead I turned the car around at the switchback just ahead of us and rolled back down to the valley floor.

Above: L-R, Whitehorse Mountain, Mt. Bullen, & Three Fingers tower over the Stillaguamish valley.

Once we took the load of the uphill grade off the engine it had no trouble staying cool without a fan. From here it was a very short drive home. Once there I made my mental repair checklist (I have the parts already for the fan relay & thermos-switch) while I parked the Jaguar in the garage and re-wrapped it in its cover. Later I’ll move it out to the barn and start the “Spring Cleaning” to prepare it for a season of driving. Meanwhile I had other things to attend to, namely retrieving some stuff from our roof leftover from the big snow, some repairs in the barn, and making another batch of BioDiesel – the rest of my day was already scheduled with pressing tasks. It was wonderful though to enjoy a respite from the mundane behind the wheel of an extraordinary machine.

I can’t wait for winter to end!