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What will you name him/her?
-Dave
Craig
Congrats on the new wheels.
I'm sure L.L.Bean/Subaru will be glad to supply you with a WRX shirt. Just pony up the greenbacks!
Or maybe Subaru bucks?! Hmmm...
Jim
Steve
Steve: I am keeping the OBW. I'll probably divide my time between the WRX and OBW evenly (well, after the WRX is properly broken-in, that is). I'd like to keep mileage low on the WRX if possible. Sometime down the road, perhaps when we decide to have kids, I am sure I will need to choose one or the other, or maybe sell my wife's Forester. For now, I will have a little fun!
Craig
Long Live Al-Gator!!!!
Team IAC also was able to take home 2nd place in 3 different classes @ NASA as well as most of the door prizes and over 1/2 the gag-trophies. Some of which included:
Zephyr (00 2.5RS): 2nd Place in F Class + Most cones for the season (180)
Spencer (91 Honda Civic): 2nd Place in H Class + "Driver can run faster than his car"
Paisan ('89 XT6, '99 Outback, '98 OBs): 2nd Place in G Class + "Car most likely to appear on Junkyard Wars"
Adam (00 2.5RS): 4th in E Class + "Most likely to keep a rental car mechanic employed" (We used his rental for the last race of the year with 4 drivers doing 8 runs each, burned up the tires after 4 runs each and had to have em replace mid-auto-x)
Thanks again for Hypov who was always out to support us and participate at the NASA events!
-mike
paisan - Congrats to you, Dave and the rest of the team!!
-Dennis
glad to have been there
Plenty of fun racing Al Gator(OB) and Ginger (OBS).
well, I would be 'H' no more this season.
-Dave [blushing]
-mike
Greg
-Dave
Calling the juiceman.
Cheers Pat.
-mike
Cheers Pat.
-mike
bit
Shifter surround
HVAC surround
Left side of wheel fog/cruise panel.
(sorry for the cross post)
bit
It is also very light and they say it is waterproof,all you have to do after a rain is just to give it a shake and the water disperses.
Obviously I only use the cover from spring to fall,as the car is outside all the time at the camp so the cover really protects the paint.
Cheers Pat.
I'll prolly tint her windows for her b-day in March, too. Maybe I'll line the gloveboxes with some of that self-adhesive felt liner from the craft store, like Pat suggested. Lucky's gonna look nice.
Ken/Kate: glad to hear you met up, sounds like fun.
paisan: keep on runnin', make us proud.
Serge: congrats on getting quoted. I just saw the print copy of Autoweek where one of Mr. Bob Holland's letters was quoted (saw another not too long ago).
-juice
-mike
Pat: how's the new pup adjusting?
-juice
bit
Hey, so I was mentioned in the WSJ after all. In the "Me & My Car" feature, on page D4 of today's print Wall Street Journal.
It lists a sample of Miata owners, I'm first: "Airton Teixeira, Technology Analyst with the World Bank", then two others. Mentions a little about the car, then some demographics about the owner.
That's 4 times (Drive, Autoweek, Business Week, and WSJ), not that I'm competing with Bob or anything. ;-)
-juice
-mike
Cheers Pat.
Folks here at work ask why I haven't been quoted 4 times in PC Week or something more along those lines!
-juice
-Frank P.
-juice
Bob
-juice
It's funny. Even though all of us have been Internet buddies for several years, rarely do we ever get the opportunity to actually "pronounce" one another's last name. I don't even know what Paisan's last name is, let alone how to pronounce it. I'm sure that's the same with others here. Ed (lark), for example, I don't know what your last name is.
Man, I think I've just opened a whole new can of worms here...
Bob
In the southeast they might say "rah" on the last syllable. In rural areas they might even roll the R and you'd hear "Tay-Shay-rrrrah". That's the funny one.
Lots of american names sound different in Portuguese. One thing is you almost never end a word with a consonant sound. So Bob would be pronounced "Bo-bi".
Some more funny translations:
William = Guilherme, with a strong G sound
Warner = Gustavo (don't ask, I have no idea why)
Yankee = Ianquee (hilarious, no?)
We don't really use K, W, or Y in our vocabulary.
-juice
Almost thought this was Chinese-like until I realized the first letter is an "I" and not an "L". 8~D
Jim
Man, I think I've just opened a whole new can of worms here..."
Bob: My last name is in my profile. It's currently the second most common in the US. I know paisan's - he shares it with a public figure in this part of the country, though I've never asked him if he's related to that public figure.
See you all in the chat later, I hope.
Ed
Cheers Pat.
bloop!bloop!bloop!bloop!bloop!bloop!bloop!bloop!
hehe
-Colin
I couldn't post late this afternoon. Juice said posts were being lost. I gave up to try later to log on for the CHAT.
When I tried to log on to Edmunds, my computer crashed (I could log on to other sites). I keep trying, and crashing...
I ran Norton Disk Doctor—no problems...
I re-installed AOL, and still kept crashing whenever I tried to log on to Edmunds...
Finally, after launching AOL again, I tried via Netscape 7—and was able to log on—but man is it slow!!!!
I still can't log on via AOL!! I missed the CHAT because of all these problems.
What's going on here???
Bob
-Dave
I must have wasted a good 2 hours, if not more, screwing over this C&%*!
Bob
Tonight the brain is back (a bit) after I got back from Sydney. I normally live in Melbourne, which is the capital of Victoria, Australia's south-easterly mainland state. For the past few weeks, I have been working out of Sydney, the capital of New South Wales that is about 900 km (say 550 miles) away. Pressure of work meant that I had to scratch my Summer Holidays.
Australia takes its Summer break from Christmas Eve through to Australia Day (26 January) and the school summer stretches a few days further at each end. Thus the kids were on holiday when it was critical for me to be in Sydney. The company offered to pay for accommodation so we have been "camped out" in a luxury apartment with views over Sydney Harbour and the Harbour Bridge. Sydney is one of the great water cities of the world and there is a fabulous network of ferries of that zips from jetty to city around the many reaches of the harbour. The kids are now seasoned ferry travellers with a better knowledge of Sydney's bays and beaches than their father will ever know. Some of these little (and not so little) ships are named Sirius, Supply, Golden Grove, Charlotte and so on after ships of the first fleet which brought Sydney's first settlers - convicts, soldiers, guards and whores - to our shores..
Getting to Sydney is half the fun, especially with a Subaru. There are two major routes, the Hume Highway that tracks roughly North East from Melbourne across the Great Dividing Range, through 890km of mostly freeway across undulating grazing land and back through the Great Dividing Range once more. That sounds silly to a foreign reader, but the barrier created by the Great Dividing Range is real, particularly near Sydney. Australia is the oldest continent. Eroded, its highest mountain barely tops 7,000 feet but the Great Dividing range which is particularly close near Sydney (referred to as the Blue Mountains) stopped inland exploration for 25 years as no one could find a path across it.
Most of the country is desert but along the Eastern fringe lies a line of mountains, sitting close to the coast which start at the Northernmost point, meandering south along the eastern seaboard, rarely exceeding 100 miles from the sea until it fades away about 300 miles west of Melbourne. Rain soaked clouds drift aimlessly across the desert landscape from the West, dripping occasional showers upon the parched land before striking the Great Dividing Range. Suddenly they dump their contents upon the green mountains, half the water flowing inland to irrigate the parched land and the balance falling in torrents to streams flowing to the nearby coast. East of the Range is wet and green, West is dry and scrubby. Australia is cursed by frequent droughts and its flora has adapted to fires, demanding regular burns to regenerate the forests. The seeds of the Acacia need fire to crack their hard seed pods. As they grow they provide protection for the slower growing eucalyptus which ultimately overshadow them sometimes growing to three hundred feet or more.
Fire may come gently every year or, ferociously once a century. The aborigines, Australia's first settlers, who trekked here across a land bridge from Asia maybe 70,000 to 100,000 years ago, used fire to drive out game. When Abel Tasman, the first European to sight our Eastern coast saw the continent it was shrouded in smoke, an issue which has flared again as we drove home in recent days. Fires broke out after lightning strikes seventeen days ago and are now burning in six of Australia's states, having even encroached on Canberra, destroying 550 homes and businesses. The fire storm which swept into Canberra last Saturday was a few hours ahead of our intended visit there so we cut short our trip. We drove home along the Hume Highway, through thick smoke from the string of fires in the Australian Alps all the way. The trip was done in reduced visibility (down to 200 yards at times) and Melbourne has remained cloaked in a smoke pall which stretches more than a thousand mile East to West and about five hundred North to South over the past few days. You can get an idea of the smoke spread from the attahced NASA photo (merge the next two lines to get the link)
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/production/single.cgi?2003024/
crefl1_143.A2003024002001-2003024002500.2km.jpg
Our trip North East to Sydney was more leisurely. The second route to Sydney wanders through my home region of Gippsland, wet and hilly with dense wet sclerophyll forest and thick with wildlife. Fully laden, the Outback's self levelling rear suspension jacks up to even the ride height and the low range gearbox gives an added push as we climb the first hill from home. It's time for the dog's holiday too so we leave her, playing "neckies" with Mum's young mongrel, a game referreed noisily by her aged Border Collie. Dogs alone know the rules of the game but hiding behind Mum is apparently "Barley" whilst they catch their breath.
As the route meanders first East and then North, the forest thickens, the curves grow sinuous and the road narrower. We stopped amongst ancient forest, pulling from the Princes Highway onto a forest trail where the kids could admire skinks and parents worry about the constant risk of snakes. Australians are justifiably edgy about the risk of snakes; we have fourteen of the world's fifteen most poisonous and none have the manners to rattle before they bite. Pulling off the dirt track shows up one defect with the Outback; long rear overhangs means the towbar bottoms out before the car has gone near its climbing ability. We have left the dog behind but not the teddy bears who join us in an alfresco picnic of jelly beans and chocolate bars with the sound of kookaburras and magpies a wonderful accompaniment.
Over the border into New South Wales, we stop at Eden, a former whaling town famous for a pod of killer whales who, working co-operatively with the early sailors, would drive passing mammlas toward the flensing pots of the waiting killers. Prudence would suggest a wide berth for their surviving descendants but Eden is still a prime whale-watching site.
Further North we leave the highway and follow the coast over rough clay surfaced roads from Tathra to Bermagui. A sudden thunderstorm drenches the road, sending streams of silt across the corrugated surface, suddenly reinforcing the benefits of permanent All Wheel Drive. The dust of a day's travel is instantly replaced by splashing of mud around the flanks of the Outback and across my wife, unwisely admiring the rain through an open window. I might get the mud splashes off the inside of the windscreen next week. The slick surface of the clay allows some low speed fun, sliding all four wheels of the Subaru at about ten miles per hour.
End of Part 1
Cheers
Graham
Bermagui is the centre for Sport fishing in Australia with fine catches of Black and Striped Marlin and other sport fish. Zane Grey, the popular American author popularizes the spot in the 1930's but it retains an unaffected village feel. For us, the appearance of a hyper-relaxed seal in the boat harbour, catching seafood snacks and swimming backstroke whilst clapping flippers caps off a lovely day.
Bermagui's thick forests are crowded around estuaries from the Pacific Ocean, which team with bird and fish life. Termite Mounds, some eight feet or more high are thick through the forest, each housing a colony of ants who use the huge mounds as homes, larders, air-conditioning systems and defensive battlements. The mounds are formed from soil and mucous built up by generations of ants. They are a major hazard for the unwary and have been known to break bulldozer blades. There's an opportunity for some Management Guru to use this as an observation in their next text, but I can't quite see it myself - perhaps the benefit of good organisation in repelling unwanted takeovers?
Just North of Bermagui, and ironically back on bitumen, a rotten tree falls across our path too late to halt before it. The resulting crash throws the wheel alignment off but in8itially I think there is little serious damage. Leaving the family safely in the car off the road, I join other motorists in clearing the fallen tree to prevent other accidents. Its only when I attach a rope to haul the remaining tree trunk from the road that I realize that the tree has exacted its own revenge by slashing the sidewall of a Yokohama Geolandar with 10,000km of tread still left upon it. Australian Outbacks are fitted with a full size spare on a steel rim but I ponder that it is ten years since I last had to change a tyre. The first law of tyre changing remains though - "You will only suffer a flat when the boot is full". Early Subarus, like some Renaults, mounted the spare wheel above the engine under the bonnet - would that it were still the same. Fortunately, a law enforcement officer and police patrol car stop, protecting the car from passing traffic and onlookers.
North from Bermagui we wander through familiar haunts near Bateman's Bay - as a student in Canberra, Australia's capital, I would join friends in buying a cask of wine and loaves of fresh bread from a bakery in Braidwood before venturing here to pick fresh oysters from the rocks. One useful lesson from these pleasures was the stupidity of returning home with a bucket of oysters - it fell over on the last corner and flooded the car with salty water and oyster meat - not a pretty site hosing your car out at midnight!
A further pleasure is Pebbly Beach, famous for its friendly kangaroos and parrots. Until recently, you could safely feed these animals from your hand but concerns over the long term impact on their health (and a tendency for kangaroos, like bears to become aggressively demanding of feeds) now means that you must admire them from a distance.
From Pebbly Beach we get back onto the highway, which carries ever thicker traffic toward Sydney. The stop start holiday traffic makes me wish for an auto as the overloaded Outback . If I lived in Sydney it would be an essential. Home in Melbourne, the traffic flows more freely.
When we get to Sydney and with family clutter unloaded, the Outback returns to its day job, zipping back and forth across the Harbour Bridge. I can't help noticing how popular Subarus, particularly Outbacks are in Sydney. Here in Australia it is a real aspirational car, up there with Volvo, BMW and Mercedes.
Might wrap up here and off to bed
Cheers
Graham
-Brian
Oh and Ed I'm not at ALL related to HIM. He should be in prison, you should know that I'm not related to such a left wing commie!
-mike
:-(
Craig
Graham: great travelogue. My wife has been to Australia and NZ, her brother lived in NSW in the early 1990s. I hope to get there someday. Right now it looks like France and Brazil and the next countries I'll visit.
Johnson (that's for you, Bob ;-) )
Bob