Month: February 2006

What the MINI is all about – Motoring

What better way to celebrate new plates and a fresh bath than to go on a little road trip in the MINI. There’s nothing like a buffalo burger to celebrate a drive so we set out yesterday from our home in Brawley to the Rong Branch restaurant in Julian. Most of the route is State route 78 which blasts west through the desert, past the OHV area at Ocotillo Wells and then winds up and down through the mountains before Julian; perfect terrain for the MINI. The motoring gods were smiling on us – even though we caught up with many RVs and trailers we always had enough clear road ahead to go zooming by.

On the way back I decided on a scenic detour. Back down the steep twisties from Julian and then southbound on Imperial/San Diego County Route S2. I’d never done the whole of S2 before and its a great road, two lanes, lots of open road, some tight twisties and great great scenery. Cruising top down was a blast.

Round trip mileage was about 170 miles and to my amazement the trip computer was showing 29.4 mpg, probably the best I’ve ever seen it read on any road trip. A good day out.

What a sweep of vanity comes this way!

New Plate It took over 8 months but my plates finally arrived and I was able to assign them to Carrie today. It wasn’t without problems though. When it came to do the reassignment, the computer would not let it happen. At one point I was asked if this was a brand new truck – huh? Eventually a supervisor came out, took my plates away and didn’t come out for another 20 minutes.

New Plate Turns out that although the plate had been produced and was in our grubby little hands, it had not been entered into the DMV computer as a plate that could be assigned. So she had to reorder the plate to get it back into the system and then she was able to assign it to me. Clearly there were powers at work that did not want me to get this plate. But, finally Carrie has the moniker she was meant to have.

Games Console Controls For Cars

Driving back from San Diego today, thinking about my upcoming interview with Sony next week, and I found myself pondering why cars have steering wheels and pedals these days. Pretty much every kid and young adolscent plays a games console and that means either joystick or console control paddle. And these kids can do all the driving stuff with those controls, and are pretty damn good at it too. So why aren’t manufacturers proposing cars which are driven by using a couple of rocker switches and a few buttons? We need to get hip to the new generation, y’all.