I tend to post something about my car every thousand miles, mostly to keep track of utilization and whatnot. And, being as I passed another thousand mile milestone this morning, here is said post.
I bought the car with 20 miles on it on August 10th, 2022 – 317 days ago – so I’m averaging about 9.5 miles a day, or approximately 284 miles a month… Not a lot of miles, but that’s because I live 4 miles from work, generally only go in every other day, and don’t really go very far any other time I’m out.
Though I might put some miles on the car this weekend – if all things align…
Anyway, I get a lot of thumbs up, window leans, and walk-ups when I’m out and about with the car – so if you don’t like to be noticed this is the wrong car for you… And the question order when someone walks up is as follows:
“Does it got a Hemi in it?” – Yes, yes it does.
“Is it fast?” – It’s fast enough.
“What kinda gas mileage it get?” – Honestly? I don’t really know.
To be fair, if you have to worry about gas mileage or gas prices this really isn’t the car for you. I know it holds 18.5 gallons of ‘the expensive stuff’ as it requires 91 octane or better, and uses about a quarter of a tank of that per week. So if I’m averaging 284 miles a month on 18.5 gallons we can extrapolate that it’s getting about 15 MPG… But that’s just an educated guess as I top the thing off every Saturday and don’t really sweat the details.
I also don’t really do any highway travel in the car either… I mean, the longest highway trip in the last month was the eight miles from the office to MicroCenter and back. I’m sure it’ll hit the roughly 400 miles per tank that US cars get on average if I did some highway travel, so I expect it gets about 25 MPG on the highway.
That’s still a far cry from the Nissan Kicks econobox commute-appliance I had before this – which got about 50 MPG on the highway… But the 300 is by far a nicer place to be with all of the leather and legroom and sound deadening and speakers and ride quality and performance and safety features and…
And I don’t have to roll the dice every time I merge with traffic – so there’s that too.
That has to be it. It’s the only thing I can think of that explains the propensity for people to completely miss the fact that my bright white four door rocket barge with the crazy loud race car exhaust is sitting in the spot they wish to occupy at that moment.
Here’s today’s example…
See if you can catch the exact moment he realizes I’m right there…
I drive super defensively because of stuff like this, so I kinda knew the guy in the truck was just going to ‘come on over’ right about the time he merged onto Parker road (the road in the video). So there wasn’t any real danger – just more annoyance that people behind the wheel are generally oblivious these days.
I need to set the clock on the camera I guess – it was 0600
Another day, another curious example of why everyone’s car insurance costs so much…
The police officer who pulled up into the opposite turn lane just as the space cadet ran the light and pulled out in front of the silver SUV – resulting in blaring horns – was apparently as dumbfounded as everyone else was and just let it go.
I guess it was just too damn early in the morning for this kind of stupid.
I just got back from the gas station, which oddly ties into my last post about the cost of food and the financial gymnastics that goes on to afford things in 2023…
My grocer has a loyalty card thing that gives me points for every dollar I spend on food, and said points can be used for a $0.10 / gallon of gas discount per 100 points – which can only be used at their station and expire monthly.
I currently spend $400-$500 a month on food, which is 400-500 points per month – or $0.40 or $0.50 off per gallon – and I use a bit less than a quarter tank a week so I need about a tank of gas per month…
So today I fed my planet destroying hemi a bit over 16 gallons of 91 octane for $3.39 a gallon after the $0.50 a gallon discount.
That means it was still over $50 to fill the tank, which sucks, but it could have been closer to $70… And every dollar counts right now.
Listening to "Neon Daydreams" by Dana Jean Phoenix
Right after posting the last ramble about an old server, my roommate IM’d me to ask if I left the garage door open when I left; I didn’t. In fact, I wait for the door to fully close before I pull away because the door from the house into the garage is usually unlocked – so, no, I didn’t leave it open.
A few minutes later he IMs to tell me someone broke into his truck, which he has to park on the street because it won’t fit in the garage, and cleaned it out – including the garage remote – which explains the door being open…
Fortunately we have this insanely bright LED workshop light in the garage that also happens to be on a motion sensor. I’m guessing as soon as the thieves tripped the motion detector and were blinded by the shop lights they decided to not clean out the thousands of dollars in tools.
So, police report done, insurance claim made, and garage opener reset we continue on.
Unfortunately this is the third “you live in the third world now” incident in almost as many days:
Thursday the HOA mass-mailed the community to remind everyone to keep their garage doors closed because some homeless guy was sleeping in someone’s open garage.
Friday we had the nearby fire, which I’m told was caused by a homeless camp out in the woods and their cook fire.
And last night the truck was broken into and cleaned out. The contents are probably in a pawnshop by now…
Now, I live in a pretty nice area full of half-million dollar or more homes, and for the last few years the place has been really nice – but apparently things have changed. I wonder what that could be in response to?
Rhetorical question, don’t bother answering.
Might be getting on to a time where I need something other than hunting rifles…
The other day when the roomie and I were returning from dinner at Culver’s, I noted the odd antenna box sitting next to the rearview mirror in his truck and decided to look it up on my phone.
It turns out that it’s part of a Viper alarm / remote start system.
The roomie wants remote start for his truck and was naturally interested in this, wondering if it worked and if so if it was a simple matter of getting new fobs for it. But nothing I could find online for the system seemed to work – in fact it appeared to have no power. So, I started poking around under the hood and found a heavy gauge wire stuffed behind the battery that had been cut off.
And that led us to spending half the day in the garage tearing the truck apart…
Tracing out the power wire led to half of a subwoofer install behind the driver’s side rear seat, and that required unbolting and removing the seat to get to. So while the roomie rummaged around in the dash looking for the Viper box, I was tasked with removing the seat and then the remains of the subwoofer.
It took about an hour, but I was successful. The Infinity Reference 551a amp, the Hifonics Zeus processor, the Rockford Fosgate level converter, and about a mile of random RCA cables and speaker wire that was balled up under the carpets have all been removed.
It was the first car stereo stuff I’ve done since my PT Cruiser, and was kinda fun… And got me thinking about tuning up the 300’s audio a bit – even though it’s already pretty amazing.
As for theViper stuff – it had been removed from the truck. They left the antenna portion because it’s glued in place and the cable run through the headliner would clearly be a PITA to remove. So, like the sub, the previous owner pulled the easy to get to stuff and left the hard to get to for us to figure out.
And this led to the roomie finding out the Viper system was purchased and installed by BestBuy, and he has purchased and scheduled an appointment to have the new one installed.
Remote start is a powerful sales tool apparently. 🙂
Listening to "Running in the Night" by FM-84 and Ollie Wride
Yesterday morning I mentioned to my roommate that his 2017 75th anniversary edition Wrangler unlimited was leaking all over the garage floor – which prompted an hour of helping him figure out what was leaking… Some PCV hose at the back of the intake manifold that requires a contortionist with really small hands to get to had come apart and was blowing oil all over back there.
See, the V6 “Pentastar” that runs the average newer Jeep is installed with a gallon of KY and a shoe horn. It’s such a tight fit that you have to essentially take the upper half of the engine off to change the spark plugs – and this virtually inaccessible problem at the back of the intake was just the latest in a long line of frustrations with this Jeep: it’s underpowered, poorly geared, rides like a paint shaker, has no real amenities outside of the stuff he’s installed over the years, and it’s also a pain in the butt to work on.
This led to yet another discussion about him wanting a truck – something Dodge with a similar drive train to my 300 so we can buy bulk oil, filters, brake pads, etc (and he can use my cast-off parts as I upgrade things) – but not wanting to go into debt for another decade just to get one… And there was the worry that a truck wouldn’t fit into our 1.75 car garage because even the small 1500 is like 20 feet long…
And that led to me mentioning a local used truck dealership that I’d shopped in the past, Berkenkotter, which got really good reviews, and pulling them up on my computer to show him what they had.
The first truck was what he needed but wasn’t what he wanted. So I dug around a bit more and found a 2019 Dodge Ram “Rebel” 4WD with the 5.7L Hemi in it for a decent price. So off we went to go look at it.
The first stop was the dealership I knew about, which is right next door to a BBQ place I like in Parker – Hickory House. Unfortunately the truck wasn’t at this location and we were sent to Castle Rock to the other location.
And unknown to us there are actually two Berkenkotter dealerships in Castle Rock, and Siri sent us to the wrong one… So back in the Jeep and five blocks north to the right location.
We got there and I practically took the truck apart right there in the parking lot to check it out – and everything seemed okay. It’s a 2019 with about 38,000 miles on it, and I know the drivetrain when properly looked after can go a quarter million miles without issue.
So the roomie got the keys and took the thing for a spin while I stayed behind, and he returned with a huge grin… The 5.7L V8 compared to the Pentastar is a completely different animal.
Anyway, the dealership offered him $4k more than he owed on the Jeep, which was used as the down on the truck and taking its cost to about $30k, and after taking everything out of the Jeep and depositing it on the floorboard in front of the rear driver’s side passenger seat, he drove it home.
Me airing up the tires while the roomie takes pictures of his new truck. That’s the town’s namesake “Castle Rock” in the background.
The truck needed air in the tires and was on fumes, so we stopped just up the road at a 7-11 to fix this… $120 later the tank was full and the tires at 55psi.
All in all the truck is in pretty nice shape. I ran the Carfax on it and it was $51k new and a rental in Utah for the first 5 months of its life – which was also 13,000 of the 38,000 miles. From there it was auctioned off and picked up by Larry H Miller, brought to Denver, and sold to someone who put the rest of the miles on it before trading it in for something else.
It’s definitely “used” and has the dings and scratches of a work truck, but mechanically it’s in good shape. It needed the front sway bar links re-torqued, as all of these trucks do, which was what we did this morning.
Then the roomie took the truck over and got it washed right after lunch, so it doesn’t look quite as homely now:
2019 Ram Rebel 4WD in black – as is proper.
The thing I find most interesting about the truck is just how much storage it has… There are cubbies everywhere; in the rear floorboards, under the seats, in the doors – there are even two gloveboxes and the center console probably holds ten gallons of stuff. Perfect for my packrat roommate.
It also has a really nice interior:
The stereo sounds good and the space radio service is still running, so we’ve had the ’80’s on 8′ station running for the last two days. The truck needs new tires and the pre-requisite oil change; the Hemis are really oil sensitive and who knows when the last one was done, so it’s important.
The roomie also wants to add a hard cover to the bed, remote start, and the 8.4″ uConnect touch screen to it, which is about three grand, but otherwise he seems rather happy with the thing.
The down-side – because there’s always a down-side – is the truck is two inches too long to fit in the garage. This means the roomie has been relegated to visitor parking a hundred yards from the house and my 300 now has the garage to itself… Which I can certainly live with, but it’s not optimal.
Just to show how prevalent the crazies are now, this is three days after the last post, which also happens to be the next time I left the house…
And people ask why I never leave the house…
The best bet these days is to assume everyone around you will simply drive into you if given the chance. This is why I tend to leave huge distances between me and the car in front of me so that when they ‘have an episode’ and drive into something I’m clear of the carnage (and get good footage).
A while back I wrote about the dash-cam I installed and the reasons why – because it’s kind of a daily thing where someone does something boneheaded in the 5 miles between the house and the office.
I figure’d I’d post one from this morning, as an example…
Pay attention to the lights…
People ask why I head to work at 0600; because there’s only one or two of these people on the road at that hour. 🙂
(I got a note that the video wasn’t playing for someone. I’m guessing it’s because I exported the video as HEVC (h.265), which tends to only work with new(er) hardware. I’ve re-uploaded the clip as h.264, which is bigger but should be more compatible)
The final piece of my vehicular mod-list was completed today; I think I’m done for the foreseeable future now.
Looks: Limousine-grade tint all the way around.
Performance: Unlocking the computers in the car to enable the SRT stuff.
Sound: the stock exhaust is designed for people who don’t want to know the car is running.
Today that last item was completed.
Yes, that really is an engine the size of a large doghouse…
I took the car over to the local speed shop and had the four ultra-silent mufflers cut off of it, everything replaced with 2.5″ stainless steel, and added a couple of Flowmaster 40’s.
See, I’m old – so I come from a time where a ‘hot rod’ at idle tended to sound like a large boat – and if you got on the throttle they were loud enough that any discussion was reserved for the next stoplight. Fast cars were a total sensory package that included the smell of high-test exhaust, acres of brilliantly painted steel to look at, the feel of gravity moving from under you to behind you, and an incredible soundtrack powered by literal explosions.
Cars nowadays tend to have one or two of the listed items, but never the full package… Well, unless you spend six figures on something rare, exotic, and a pain in the butt to work on.
So, with the 300 I wanted to get as much 80’s teenager petrolhead-ness as possible out of it while still being a responsible adult… The car is extremely quick and has a 160MPH speedo for a reason, but never gets outside of the safety envelope for public streets where other people are being road hazards. The tint is pretty dark, but still has excellent visibility so it’s safe to drive even at night. And now it’s rumblier and louder, but (probably) won’t wake up the neighborhood when I leave for work at 6am.
There are a few more things I’d like to do to the car, such as lowering springs to take an inch out of the stance and some 305’s for the rear… But the roads are generally bad for being lowered and pulling into the average parking-lot is already as close to the front air-dam as is practical, and I think I’ll burn the tread off of the current (new) tires first before investing in newer ones.
Back in the 80’s cars were very analog; carburetors and chokes and points and manual steering and mechanical everything including the windows. Back then the Lamborghini Countach, the space-age dream car that festooned the walls of every red-blooded teenaged boy, had a whopping 370 horsepower from twelve cylinders of high-tech supercar engine…
In the 80’s, while the Lambo ruled hearts and minds, I was playing a lot of Cyberpunk with friends…
As far as Cyberpunk was concerned though, to make the science fiction setting of Cyberpunk more science fiction the cars were electro-mechanical marvels of electronics and computers. You could even ‘hack’ a car to do things to it like steal it or increase performance.
It was all very futuristic.
Last night I got to relive those late 80’s vibes by hacking the computers in my 300 to enable a lot of locked features.
See, the car I bought is essentially an SRT (Street and Racing Technology) without the SRT badging. It’s an “executive saloon” and not a “race car” according to Chrysler… Even though it’s the “S” model so it has all of the sporty bits, and I got it with the big hemi V8 instead of the V6.
But, in the interest of propping up the actual race cars like the Hellcats and whatnot, what Chrysler does is simply set all of the sporty bits to “automatic” in the computers, and then disables the owner’s access to the controls to make the car a not-SRT. So the stuff is in there, and the computers know how to interface with all of the stuff on the car, I just needed to get access to the controls.
It turns out that the user interface system in the car runs JAVA and all of the UX is handled through .jar applications, and all of the SRT .jar files were in the system but not in the boot-loader.
So I put on my hackerman pants and got to work…
I’ll not bore you with the details, but it’s a car full of computers and I’m kind of a car guy who has been into computers since the literal dawn of time.
SRT dash bootupSRT UConnect bootupThe SRT gauge package on the UConnect screenAll of the SRT toys are accessible and work just fine
The up-side is the car even more fun to drive now; it holds gears longer, the throttle response is better, and the drivetrain has been de-civilized which really livens up the “executive saloon”. And I can turn it back into a cushy highway cruiser with the press of a few buttons, so I didn’t really loose anything.
The down-side is I can’t really take the car to the dealership now as I’m sure they wouldn’t be impressed with my hackery. And while I can back out all of my changes, I’m not sure if I left footprints in the system…
That’s not too big of a deal as I get my oil changed at a local mechanic’s shop and, in theory, the car won’t need dealership attention until after the warranty is up.
So the notice regarding the county having my title work done came in a few weeks back, so I set up an appointment at the DMV to get my old plates switched to the new car and pay the laundry list of fees and taxes associated with doing that.
Yes, an appointment, because for government offices zombies are apparently still a thing and they don’t want anyone inside the building if at all possible. And the first available 15 minute appointment was this afternoon – a mere two weeks after the notice.
Anyway, I left work a bit early today and wandered over to the local DMV, where I once again arrived early and the robot wouldn’t let me in the building until 15 minutes before the appointment… So I hung out on a nearby bench and ogled all of the cars with temp tags – of which about a dozen were new Teslas of various flavors.
Everyone is apparently doing as instructed and buying new $70,000 electric cars. This is fine as it means more gas for my planet-destroying hemi. 🙂
I also noticed that Tesla people, by and large, are the sort who wear a mask, in the car, alone, because apparently zombies are still a thing for them too.
Eventually the appointed time arrived and the robot let me into the building, gave me a ticket, and I commenced to wait another hour and a half to talk to a human.
Said human was really very nice, probably because I had my shit together and wasn’t missing paperwork, had an expired license, didn’t have insurance, didn’t speak English, had a sketchy bill of sale, or any of the other things I saw during my 1.5 hour wait.
And this is where things got weird.
See, here in Colorado we used to be able to just transfer plates from the old car to the new car for free; we had already paid for the plates, so all we had to do was pay the taxes, fees, and have the state update the database for the new make, model, and VIN.
But now the county has determined that they weren’t making enough money on this deal, so as of January you must get new plates printed and mailed to you for the low, low fee of $65.
So, the process is now:
Purchase car
Get a temp tag and title
Wait a month for the paperwork to complete
Wait a couple of weeks for a DMV appointment
Take some time off and go to the DMV because they are only open from 10-4 on weekdays
Get another temp tag and title
Wait 2-3 more weeks for plates
And finally install plates
I’m sure it makes perfect sense to someone, but for me it’s just another example of procedural B.S. clogging up the system and yet another reason I need to get out of the Denver Metro area; the bureaucracy is getting deep.
Overall it only took about five minutes to get everything done and pay my nearly $1000 in taxes and fees for having the audacity to buy a nice car; and now I get to wait 2-3 more weeks for actual plates.
This morning I decided I would top off the gas tank and go for a drive…
The route was an old favorite; up Deer Creek Canyon to High Grade Road, and then take the back way into Conifer via Pleasant Park. From there I’d get on US 285 for a bit before getting off the highway onto Turkey Creek, which I would follow to the fire station where Deer Creek meets up and then back home.
The route looks a bit like this:
A pleasant mountain drive… Mostly…
I was hopeful that by leaving the house at 8am that I would miss most of the bicycle people, but no such luck… They love to park a couple hundred cars at the bottom of Deer Creek Canyon Rd, and then ride 3-4 abreast up to Conifer at like 3mph.
Normally this is just annoying, but on the hundred or so blind corners going up and down they become a menace because there is guaranteed to be an oncoming car any time you try to get past them. And they have zero self-preservation instinct that says “the oncoming two-ton vehicle will kill me”, so they do some truly boneheaded things… Like passing on the inside while you’re trying to not run some other bicyclist over…
But if you can ignore the cycle-rats, it’s a beautiful drive.
High Grade Road between Deer Creek Canyon and Pleasant Park… I remember when this was little more than a dirt goat path.
And one more picture from the fire station at the junction of Turkey Creek and Deer Creek…
If you know what the significance of the brown boxes are, you probably hung out with me in the 90’s. 🙂
All in all it was nice to get out of the house for a bit and get up into the hills – even with the slow moving herds of bicycle-people all over the place.
Given how bad the ‘imports’ are these days – and by import I mean someone from out of state who decided Colorado is the place to be – a dash cam is pretty much a necessity.
So, I got myself a cheap little Garmin camera, hacked some 5volt USB from the 12volt power running my auto-dimming mirror, and presto! Dash Cam.
The 300 has a steeply raked windshield and I have tint on it now, so gluing a camera to it wasn’t going to work. Ultimately I stuck the camera to the plastic housing for the sensor suite above the rear view mirror – which is the black thing at the top of the picture.
Given what I see daily on the roads now, this should not only offer some insurance protection, but also provide an endless stream of ‘people being dumb in cars’ for entertainment.
Just got the 300 back from the tint shop, and they did an amazing job.
Xpel 15% ceramic tint all the way around. From inside it’s a bit like wearing sunglasses – which is nice as I wear glasses and don’t normally see a reason to invest in prescription shades. The tint is polarized as well, so headlights no longer make me squint.
It rained buckets this afternoon, so the car was delayed a couple of hours from the shop having to play car Tetris with everything they’re working on… It looked like hail, so they got everything indoors asap.
But they put in some O/T to get the 300 done this evening, and I got it home no problem… I was a bit worried about the standing water everywhere, but the car did pretty good; no hydroplaning to speak of, even with no-season racing radials on it.
So, I can check off ‘exterior’ now. Next on the list? Exhaust.
Been a couple of days now with the 300, and just passed 100 miles – and had the first trip to the gas station…
One quarter of a tank of 91 octane: $27.76.
Basically I spent more in gas in two days than the Kicks cost in two weeks, but the 300 is infinitely more fun to tool around in.
I’ll be in the break-in period until 500 miles, so I’m taking it relatively easy on the car (no real digs from a stop, nothing over 55-60, only short bursts of acceleration, etc) – which is pretty easy as it’s such a nice cruiser and it’s just a nice place to spend some time.
After 500 miles I need to do another hundred miles or so in manual mode to run the engine in the upper RPM bands to properly seat the rings. But after that things should be suitably worn a bit and more fun can be had.
I drove down to Parker this morning to get a quote on window tint: 15% limo tint, the ceramic 3M stuff, all the way around – $800. But the place I’m having it done at does all of the rare and expensive cars in Denver, so it’s probably a fair price for the best work possible.
I’m having the windshield done as well, which isn’t exactly ‘legal’ here in Colorado, but with the rest of the windows tinted you won’t really be able to tell – which is why everyone does it. And if I get pulled over for some reason it will undoubtedly be for something more impressive than a tinted windshield. 😀
Car-wise I’m really, really happy with the 300 and as you can tell by the hundred miles in two days; I’ve been looking for reasons to drive somewhere. I have all of the tech in the car set up and configured, so my phone has a constant readout of the car’s situation (fuel, oil condition, systems checks, etc.) and all of the creature comforts work (weather reports, live traffic on the map, etc).
My CFO gave me a little guff over buying it, as he always does when I pick up a new car. He’s a real-estate mogul and buys houses like I buy sandwiches – and keeps telling me I need to save my breadline chits and buy a house. I keep mentioning that whatever car I just bought is less than the required down payment on a house right now, and when I shuffle off this mortal coil I don’t have anyone to give the house to – so the gub’mint gets a free house and that kinda sucks.
He has millions, and sweats every penny (which is probably why he has millions)… A mattress stuffed full of money is nice, but it’s not as fun as a fire-breathing muscle-barge, and I’d rather have fun with my money.
No matter what you do, no one gets to take the money with them. So have a good time while you can!
Yesterday I decided to play hooky from work and go for a drive… My year old Nissan only has about 2000 miles on it, and with gas being “cheap” at $3.99 a gallon right now it seemed like a good idea.
Up front, I have to say that road trips would be immeasurably more entertaining without all of the people.
The route I took was roughly 350 miles:
Parker Rd. south to C-470
C-470 around to I-70
I-70 west to Avon
Avon to Eagle-Vail for lunch
Eagle-Vail to Leadville via US-24
Leadville to I-70 via US-91
I-70 east to C-470
C-470 to Parker Rd.
Parker Rd. back to the house
I left at about 9am, and got back at about 5pm; eight hours. Of this about three hours was creeping along C-470, a six-lane super highway, because of the bumper-to-bumper traffic…
Once I got up I-70 a ways, past Idaho Springs, things got much better because there’s a lot less people up there. Sure, there’s still slow moving RVs and even slower moving semis to contend with. But with the dramatic reduction in people it’s not so bad.
My car did far better than I assumed it would. See, the Kicks is a ‘city car’ – it’s designed for stop and go traffic in dense urban centers with narrow roads and tight parking… Accordingly it’s got like a hundred horsepower, a CVT transmission, and a 0-60 time of about 10 seconds.
If you turn the A/C on, the 0-60 time rises to an impressive 15-ish seconds, which is slow enough to get you killed merging onto the 75mph highways we have around here.
The tradeoff for this lackadaisical performance is the thing gets an average of 33MPG in town, and will push close to 50MPG on the highway. Just try to never be in a hurry because the car has zero hustle.
Anyway, given this I assumed taking the Kicks up into the realm of 6% grades for 5-10 miles at a shot would be, at best, comical… But the car did pretty good! Once it’s up to speed, the infinite gearing of the CVT can keep the car at 60-65 at pretty much any angle.
I did worry a bit on the long hill out of Georgetown to the Eisenhower Tunnel, because the engine in the car stayed at 4000RPM for a good ten minutes. But it seems no worse for it.
Eventually I pulled off I-70 just west of Vail and took US-6 into Avon… I drove by where the Pawnshop used to be, some of my favorite hangouts around town that are long gone, and drove past the old house on Deer Blvd… The house is really run down; few people take care of things anymore.
Satisfied with the sight-seeing, and the fact it was approaching noon, I wandered back down US-6 to where Paddy O’Days used to be… Used to – it’s now the Route 6 Cafe. The Route 6 Cafe used to be a mile east on US-6, and was a breakfast / brunch place with really good food that I ate at fairly often – so I decided to try out the new incarnation in the building that used to be my favorite burger joint…
It was weird to sit in my usual booth in the back corner of the bar section (near the bathrooms), with the old booths, bar, and stuff on the walls – but not be at Paddy’s.
Looking towards the bar from the main door. My booth is to the left in the back, and the space on the other side of the bar used to be an in-house pizzaria
The pizza side of the place is now a half dozen pool tables, but overall the vibe is the same – which is good.
I got the patty-melt to check if things were still of a quality to drag people up here for lunch, and yeah – they still make an amazing burger.
On they way out I got a chance to talk to Ollie, the owner, for a couple of minutes. Apparently the head cook is still the same guy from my years in the valley, which explains the continuation of quality.
Having been fed, watered, and relieved, I headed west on US-24 though Minturn and past Redcliff…
I stopped at a few of my favorite places to sit and read a good book. One of which is a big flat boulder south of the Gilman mine a bit and across the valley from a huge series of waterfalls…
From Battle Mountain, looking west
It’s hard to see the falls because they are about two miles away – but see that big pine tree in the foreground? Just to the right of its top you can see the silvery line of water.
Photos simply can’t do scenes like this justice, because there’s no sense of depth. For example, those power poles on the left are about two hundred yards away. But if you look really close on the right side you can see more power poles, and those are probably a mile away.
I sat here and watched the storm roll in as the temperature dropped from 65 to about 50 degrees, and then drove down from Tennessee Pass under leaden skies. By the time I hit Leadville it was raining, and by the time I made it to the Climax mine, it was a biblical downpour.
The rain continued to fall in buckets all the way back down I-70 until I reached the Denver side of Floyd Hill where, as usual, the rain shut off like someone turning a valve, and it went from 65 to about 100 degrees.
Denver is literally cursed.
Listening to "Dropping Anchor" by Jimmie's Chicken Shack
On Thursday I had to drive across town to the dealership for the yearly oil change, tire rotation, lube and tune session – which is why I burned almost three gallons this week instead of the customary two.
The dealership was slightly concerned that I didn’t like the car, because I have driven a whopping 1800 miles since I bought it about a year ago… Even with everything being stupidly expensive, apparently people are still averaging a thousand miles a month.
Too rich for my blood.
I did manage to score a very rare and hard-to-acquire brag sheet for the new Z while I was there:
I was told by the sales guy that every dealership will get one or two of the new Z cars some time in late July – with no real choice on color, model, or spec because of the ever-present Supply Chain Issues that plague everything these days.
And because of this scarcity, the expected dealer markup will be $8-$10k – of course.
I still added my name to the list of a dozen or so people interested in one… But I doubt I’ll seriously consider anything until the NISMO version is released.
I spent some time chatting with the sales guy as it was a slow day and I had no where else to be until they finished with my car; I regaled him with tales of my 240Z, 280Z, 300ZX turbo, and 370Z Nismo and gave him a lot of pointers on the various platforms. He tried to talk me into buying a purple 2016 370Z they had on the lot – but I’m holding out for the new one.
And that was about it for the week; just continuing to put one foot in front of the other and hoping the shit-show abates eventually.
Back on March 25th I snapped a photo of this pump, where I paid $5 for one and a quarter gallons of gas.
Today it was $10 for two and a quarter gallons. $4.40 a gallon. And we haven’t even gotten to the summer price hikes yet – whee!
A friend of mine has a Tesla and loves to be wink-wink nudge-nudge smug about the current gas prices…
“Wow, over $4 a gallon – that has to suck.”
“Yeah, cost me $10 and 45 seconds to add a hundred miles of range to my car. Horrible.”
I’m so glad I traded the Murano for the Kicks when I did, because the Kicks is cheap to feed even with crazy gas prices because it’ll get close to 50mpg on the highway and is averaging 30 in-town even with all the stop and go.
Good timing on my part I guess.
Listening to "Days Are Numbers (The Traveller)" by The Alan Parsons Project
