During the week I normally eat breakfast at home before I head into the office, but today I decided to splurge and get something on the way in.
I drive right past a CFA, so it’s on the way, and they make a pretty good egg, sausage, cheese bowl-thing – so that’s where I stopped.
It was a quarter to seven in the morning, so the place wasn’t busy and at the drive through window the manager meets me to talk cars for a few minutes.
He looks over the Hellcat, nods, and asks the usual questions:
Hellcat?
Yep.
Supercharged?
Yep.
How much horsepower?
About 800.
How fast is it?
I’ve done a quarter mile in 11.7 at 127mph, and 0-60 is about three and a half seconds…
After the usual questions he shows me a photo of his 2020 Shelby GT500 mustang. It looks pretty nice and he says it runs about the same in the quarter on a modded upper pulley and an E85 tune.
Anyway, this goes on until the next car pulls up behind me and he hands me my food and drink – and tells me it’s on the house and to have a nice day.
So, there ya go – if you’re looking for an excuse to buy a $70,000 race car, you can occasionally get free breakfast with it.
One of the things Colorado is infamous for is its terrible highway interchanges. The most infamous of these would be the I-25 / I-70 interchange – lovingly called “The Mousetrap”.
They rebuilt the Mousetrap in the early 90’s, and it is better now – but it still punishes tourists who haven’t planned ahead.
Back in the 80’s I drove through the ‘old’ Mousetrap fairly often – it was one of those things where you had to be in the correct lane for where you wanted to go about two miles ahead of time… Unfortunately not everyone was a local and the whole interchange was basically someone playing marbles with cars for most of the day.
It was so bad that in the 70’s Denver installed an airport-style control tower at the interchange to coordinate police and tow trucks.
It’s “Orange Season” here in Colorado, which means the surface streets all tend to be one-lane traffic jams currently. So this week I’ve been trying my luck by driving up Parker Rd. to the Parker / I-225 interchange…
And it’s a bit of a shit-show every day…
See, thanks to Cherry Creek State Park, everyone in the above area needs to get to that one spot to get on I-225. And there are only two roads to do this; Parker Rd. and Hampden Ave.
So every morning it looks a bit like this:
The people coming in from the 2-lane Hampden entrance on the right have to cross four lanes to the left in about a half-mile to go south on I-225. Meanwhile the people coming in from Parker Road at the bottom need to merge right across the 2 lanes of Hampden people trying to go left to go north on I-225.
To complicate this, if you look closely between the Hampden ramp and I-225, there are a couple of exits for the commercial park to the north…
This is where, every day, someone with out of state plates will madly charge across several lanes of 50+ mph traffic to take that Vaughn Road exit…
Something like this:
This morning I was the lucky recipient of one of these out of state people cutting right a few inches in front of my bumper.
No turn signal and no hesitation – just yanked it right.
Apparently there’s a reason the hellcat has 15.7″ 6-pot Brembo brakes on it – and it’s to stop the 4400 pound monster before it kills some idiot Californian in a beat up econobox.
I screeched to a halt, the cars behind me went three different directions, and I laid on the horn – to get flipped off for being in her way.
I probably need to just stick to the surface streets despite the cone-zones everywhere… There are fewer out-of-state people away from the highways.
Friday afternoon, here at the office, my CFO came in and asked for a ride to pick up his Camaro from the shop – he had the front suspension redone, a motor mount replaced, and other small mechanical stuff done over at ProTech.
I looked over the work and they seem to have done a good job and the cost was pretty fair.
He hopped in his Camaro and I followed him back to his place to give him a ride back to the office, and the trip resulted in a lot of turned heads and thumbs up – so that was fun.
Saturday morning I ran down to the King Soopers in Parker for groceries, and then in the afternoon I drove back down to Parker to have dinner at Hickory House – which is still the best BBQ in the area.
Parker is a great place to drive around because it’s the last bastion of Colorado’s front-range car culture. So of an evening you’ll see everything from current-year Italian supercars to 1930’s street rods running around.
Sunday I spent in my home office, sitting in the air conditioning, doing 3D model and texture work in Second Life.
A friend wanted me to theme the ground level of their two sims, which I wrapped up Sunday evening. And I think I might shift my avatar from an anthropomorphic dragon to a feral dragon just for fun – so I picked up a few parts for this and will work on it over the week as I have time.
And that’s the update from the weekend. Nothing earth-shattering, but it was fun / relaxing and that makes it worth it.
