Author: chuck goolsbee

Prepping for a road trip.


Above: The TDI on the lift after an oil change last weekend.

I’m heading down to San Francisco next week. I’ll be speaking at Macworld Expo’s “Mac IT Conference”… so “why…” do you ask, “is this post listed under “Cars?”

Well, I did the math and the round trip drive should cost about $80*, as opposed to the $300 or so to fly. Go figure.

* roughly 2000 miles all told, which in my car should be around 40 gallons… figure $2.00 a gallon on a 40% mixture of my homebrew.

So I’m tossing about 25 gallons of my pre-mixed homebrew into the TDI’s trunk. Luggage will go in the back seat. I’ll pump half a tank of hot oil into the tank and pull out of Arlington in the pre-dawn darkness Sunday morning. Here is the route I plan on taking.

Knowing me so well, I suggest you guys make some guesses as to:

Total elapsed time, door to door (Arlington, WA, to downtown San Francisco)
Average speed.
Number of fueling stops. (car & driver)
Number of “pit” stops (driver)
Number of encounters with Local Constabulary.
Number of Issued Citations.

Anything else you think I may have left out.

I’ll also (hopefully) have a surprise for the blog if everything works out right. Stay tuned.

–chuck

65E gets “Pixared”

I couldn’t resist… Here is my son Nicholas, enjoying an ice cream break on our father/son roadtrip in 2003 with the 65E somewhere in NW Colorado… but somehow the Jaguar has gained a bit of personality!

Here is where I learned how to do it: How to do the “Cars” Photoshop.

Took me about 20 minutes. Very cool. What do ya think?

The Truth About Cars | German Speed Limits: I Can’t Drive 155?

The Truth About Cars | German Speed Limits: I Can’t Drive 155?

I recall being in the back of a big Benz cab, going from the Munich airport into the city (a very long drive)… I was behind the driver, with my co-worker opposite me. It was his first trip to Munich, but I had been there many times before. I was just looking out the window, enjoying the scenery when I turned to say something to him. I stopped speaking when I noted his eyeballs were as big as saucers. He was staring at the dashboard in front of the cab driver with a look of fear. I glanced over the driver’s shoulder and he had the big S-class barge floating along at well over 200 Kp/h.

I just smiled and said to my friend: “Welcome to Germany.”

Up until that moment, I had no sensation of speed at all… just another cab ride on the Autobahn.

I also agree that the 80-110 MPH zone on most restricted access highways is quite comfortable, and would be achievable here in the USA if they made getting (and keeping) a driver’s license more stringent than it is now. My son is 16 and I’ve been helping him learn, but the testing – at least in my state – is laughable. 20 questions, easily half of which are concerned with fines and DUI, and very little about actual driving.

Here, take it yourself!

That is an embarrassment and pretty much sums up why Americans drive the way they do.

–chuck

RatcliffeBlog—Mitch’s Open Notebook

RatcliffeBlog—Mitch’s Open Notebook
“Then, there has been an absurd line of reporting about Saddam’s dedication to Joe Stalin. Now, he may have been an ardent admirer of another murderous monster, but when commentators appear on air suggesting that Saddam, the egomaniacal despot, had his statues made to look more like Stalin than himself, you have to wonder about the sanity of the producers. Saddam’s interest in Stalin as a model is an meaningful anecdote, but not the important explanation of Saddam’s rise to power.Why is there not coverage of the meeting between Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam in 1983, when the United States and Iraq agreed they shared many common interests? This was, of course, after the genocide for which he was sentenced to die. Joe Stalin had less direct influence on Saddam than the Reagan Administration and Don Rumsfeld, who cleared the way for sales of weapons to Iraq throughout the 1980s. President Reagan released a national security directive (NSDD 139) that codified our support of the Saddam Hussein regime in 1984.Saddam was a monster, but let’s be realistic about this. He was our monster, not Stalin’s, not Russia’s, not even Islam’s monster. Saddam was an instrument of U.S. policy toward Iran while he cemented his power in Iraq and, like many strongmen we’ve supported in the past, it backfired.

I read that on Mitch Ratcliffe’s blog this morning and it rung so very true. I remember those days… I was in my 20’s and in college, reading in Time & Newsweek how Iraq was or friend and bulwark against the Iranian regime.

The Iranians are still there, we’re sinking into a quagmire in Iraq, and we just provided the “insurgents” with a martyr.

And the best part: George W. Bush will retire and leave the whole mess… “his legacy” to some other poor bastard to try and clean up. What do you want to bet the GOP moves to control Congress and cede the White House to the Dems for ’08. Turn the next guy into “Carter II, the Sequel.”

sigh… I hate politics.

Honored again

I took the 65E out for a short drive today. The weather has been dry enough for the past few days to clear the roads. The sun was out for a short bit this morning, but replaced by high overcast by midday. It has been three months since the Jaguar has moved so I figured it was time to limber up the XK and give it some exercise. I ran into town, top down of course, gloved and hatted and teeth chattering. Went about 5 miles out, then back home. Everything worked fine, and it was a joy to hear Sir William’s Sixth Symphony once again!

When I sat back down at my desk my RSS feed in Safari told me I had a bunch of reading to catch up on. Autoblog, being its usual prolific self had several new articles up. One of them was nominations for the “Reader Ride of the Year“.. and there was my Jaguar!

I read the comments and was humbled by the praise for the car. I really am a lucky guy to be its current caretaker.

We’ll see if it gets picked. Go vote now!

BTW I managed to get connected via Autoblog, with a local Seattle Lotus Elise owner, and we’ve agreed to swap drives in each other’s cars come spring. I can’t wait.

Car Photo Of The Day… stuck in the Museum theme

Well, “stuck” may be the wrong word. I have so many good photos from this particular museum that I could stay on this track for months.

The car in front is pretty dam obvious, but can anyone name the one in the background?

You can claim the crown as the “Ultimate Car Geek” if you can name the fuzzy, out of focus slice of a car barely visible in front of the nose of the one in the background!