8/18/06

Next year, 2007, the Lotus Seven design will be fifty years old. To celebrate, a group has arranged to have a gathering of Lotus Seven inspired sports cars at “The Tail of the Dragon” in North Carolina. The event will be held, appropriately enough, on 7/7/07. I'm thinking about going. I'm trying to decide what would be the bigger ass whip: driving the Seven or towing it behind Mr. Wiggly. The trip to the host hotel came out to be about 14 to 15 hours from my house, according to Mapquest. If I broke that down to two days driving I'd still be in one or the other vehicle for seven hours at a stretch. I just did a little math and it looks like that might be one tank of gas in the Seven! I'm sure I'd have to stop at least once more than that in Mr. Wiggly. I'm not sure what kind of mileage he gets. But back to the ass whip part, I keep thinking, “Seven hours isn’t all that bad.” Of course that’s just to get there. I need to double that because of the trip home. So, four days of driving, plus the two or three days of the event, plus at least one “recovery day” before returning to work comes out to eight days. The seventh will be a Saturday and I'll already have the fourth off. If the event is Friday/Saturday, I could drive there on Wednesday and Thursday and be there on time. If the event is Saturday/Sunday, I'd have an extra “getting ready” day before leaving. So, for the pre-event days off I'd need Thursday and Friday the fifth and sixth of July 2007. I'm going to look back at this in the future and have a good laugh at my optimism/naivety/whatever when this event falls through on me! Anyhoo, back to planning, I'd need Thursday and Friday before and I think I'd plan to have Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the following week off to get home and recover. No, I think I'd plan to take the whole following week off, just in case. I'm feeling beat down just thinking about it now! I wonder if any of my buddies would want to go. Of course John is the only one who reads this, so I'll have to ask others in person. If I did bring someone along I think driving the Seven is out. Ok, so driving the Seven is probably out even if I'm going alone. The trip would be no problem behind the Pimpmobile, but I don’t plan to have it then. Oh, and the 164 gallons of gas that we’d need in the Pimpmobile would be an issue I suppose. By my calculations, the Seven would use about forty or so gallons there and back. I wonder where Mr. Wiggly would fall on that continuum. [ Don't expect better than 15mpg towing, IMO - SM ] Another plus for Mr. Wiggly, I could “camp” in the back and save on hotel bills. I'd be a dirty, dirty man by the time the trip was over! Actually, I'd do my overnight stops at campgrounds with showers if possible. Ok, this trip is beginning to sound like a reasonable thing. I'm sure I'm missing something. John will point it out to me once he sees it. Well, I think I'm going to stop and, well, think about this some more. I'll have more for you as time progresses, probably.