Category Archives: Road Trips

LUG 2026 – Day 2

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Friday, September 25

The hotel we’re staying in doesn’t offer a Continental breakfast, but they do have a Starbucks in the lobby. The only thing they offer a non-coffee drinker and someone trying not to eat sugary foods is a couple of bagels: plain or everything. In search of better options, I walked a couple of blocks to the Corner Bakery Cafe. Sadly, the options were the same, unless I wanted a sit-down breakfast. So, yeah, I ended up with an overpriced plain bagel.

Today, the plan is to head to Helper, UT, to have our little car show and lunch. It’s a two-hour drive using the fastest route. That fastest route involves interstate highways, and I’m not alone in my dislike for these roads. Since we’re trying to get something like 160 cars from here to there, there was a choice between several groups taking different routes. I decided to travel with the Lotus Colorado group.

Unfortunately, when I pulled out of the hotel parking lot, my misfire got much worse. I drove down to the main drag and just missed the green light. This was good, as there was no way I’d drive it for the 5+ hour round trip with it running like this. When the light turned green, I made a U-turn and went back to the hotel parking lot. By the time I parked it, the check engine light was flashing. I’ve never seen that before. Not a good sign.

With an undrivable car, I won’t be able to partake in most of the activities that I came here to do. I missed our takeover of the town of Helping. I won’t be able to join any of the organized drives tomorrow, the funkhana on Sunday, or the track day on Monday. And, frankly, I’ll be looking for a way to get the car to the local dealer and book a flight back home.

Long-time readers may think this sounds familiar. I had a check engine light the night before my track day at Laguna Seca and an electrical problem on my first Atlanta trip that caused me to cancel my two-day event at Barber Motorsports Park.

The difference this time is that Lotus Cars USA has their three top experts on my car at the event. One of them is Ryan, who has done a lot of work on my car, including fixing the short that wrecked my Atlanta trip. I am confident that Ryan and his colleagues will be able to diagnose the issue and, if I’m lucky, get it resolved, too.

So, I texted Ryan to see if he went to Helper or if he’s somewhere around the hotel. The answer was neither. He responded a couple of hours later, saying that he and his family had just crossed the border into Utah and would arrive at the hotel a few hours later, but wouldn’t be able to look at the car until sometime tomorrow.

Normally, I’d have a book with me. After I lugged a book around France and didn’t even read it on the plane, I didn’t bother bringing one on this trip. When would I have time to read? Every time I have a problem on one of my trips, I end up adding something to the toolbox. I won’t put it in the toolbox, but I’ll be sure to always be prepared to have time to kill. Ahem.

The hotel is practically on the University of Utah’s campus. Two medical school buildings are next door. Surely there’s a bookstore within walking distance. My Navigator friend suggested the bookstore on campus, showing me a photo of a shelf of books. It’s a 29-minute walk. Part of the walk is along a six-lane road with no sidewalk. But enough people go this way that there’s a trail. When I get to a sidewalk, there’s a crossing button I need to press to light up the sign so drivers won’t kill me in the crosswalk. I push the button three times, but it doesn’t work.

To get to the bookstore, I walk past the library. It’s the J. Willard Marriott Library. I was surprised it was named for somebody I recognized and had no idea he had connections to this area. I have no idea who the Norlin was that the CU library is named for.

Anyway, I arrive at the store. It’s two stories, with the ground floor completely filled with UU merch. Shirts, hats, jerseys, jackets, hoodies. A sign by the stairs says that book packages can be collected upstairs. Naturally, I go upstairs. I’m guessing students order online whatever few books they need dead-tree versions of and pick them up here. So much for buying a book.

For lunch, I had the challenge of locating a deli Google said was nearby. As in, practically across the street in one of the medical office buildings. Google messed with me on this one. In pedestrian mode, mind you, it directed me through the parking lot of the office building and into an entrance. I did spot a sign for the Deli, but it just had an arrow. Google did say that it was on the second floor, so I went up the stairs. This led me into a warren of offices. I was clearly not in a public space. After several turns, I managed to exit from the back, as the building is built on a hill, and the second floor is the ground floor in the back. I’m about to give up when I spot it. Navigator led me on the worst possible path to get a sandwich. What’s it got against me?

I was excited to see they served breakfast, too. A nice breakfast burrito would be a nice step up from a plain bagel. Unfortunately, they’re only open on weekdays. They cater to the office workers in the area, and there’s nothing else to bring traffic here. Oh well. Bagels it is.

I counted six cars in the parking lot when I got back from lunch. The place was deserted. Or, nearly so. I helped a guy get a go-kart from his minivan to the lobby outside the banquet room for display. Across the parking lot, over the lawn, through the double doors, and next to the staircase. It’s a Lotus go-kart. Built in Italy, sold across Europe, but only a handful made it to America.

For dinner, the eternal question: the beef or the chicken? Our speaker was Tony Shute, who led the development of the Elise, Exige, and variants. At our table, we couldn’t see the slideshow, and there was a lot of noise behind us, making him difficult to hear. On top of that, he was a soft-spoken guy. I moved to another part of the room to see the slides, but had just as much noise. So it goes.

To top off the evening, we had the awards presentation from the day in Helper. Lotus Colorado outperformed. We won exactly a third of the awards, but we’re more like a fifth of the cars.

photo by Zachary Friss

LUG 2026 – Day 1

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Every year in September, Lotus Ltd., the national club for Lotus owners, holds the Lotus Owners Gathering, or LOG. Historically, Lotus Ltd. has been, shall we say, East Coast-centric. Since I’ve been in the club, I think only four LOGs have been west of the Mississippi. Meanwhile, the Golden Gate Lotus Club and other clubs hold a West Coast Lotus Meet (WCLM), generally every other year, also around this time. As long as I’ve had the Lotus, I’ve had the sense that the two organizations may have had issues other than geographic.

It may be that relations have thawed. The title of this post does not have a typo. This year’s get-together is the Lotus United Gathering, which is what you get when Lotus Ltd. and the Golden Gate Lotus Club work together. This does not mean we won’t have both a LOG and a WCLM in the same year. The United States is a big place, and it takes a special kind of maniac to want to drive these cars three or four thousand miles (or more) in a week.

For LUG 2026, the setting is the same as LOG 40: Salt Lake City. On tap for the trip are a drive to Helper, UT for our concours; a drive to a “ghost” town (which I saw last time, so I’ll replace with an alternate); a “funkhana” (a low-speed, light-hearted obstacle course); a track day; and, on the drive home, a hike to Hanging Lake near Glenwood Springs.

Thursday, September 24

My phone’s navigation app likes to mess with me. In Death Valley, it had me going down a dirt road in the dark. It wants me to take shortcuts to bypass towns, so I miss all the restaurants and gas stations. In Missouri, it flat-out lied to me. It said the nearest gas station was 19 miles away, but at the next stop sign, I spotted one a quarter of a mile down the crossroad. I hate interstates, so I often set it to avoid highways. It directed me to a ferry across the Ohio River that operated twice a day. Once, in Tennessee, when I was on the Interstate, in a Biblical rainstorm, it had me exit the Interstate and drive a seven-mile loop, only to get back on the Interstate at the same exit1. I don’t know what I did to piss it off.

Today I decided I’d put in the address of the hotel and hit Start, then ignore whatever it said for half the day. I know it’ll want me to take I-25 to I-80, and that’s the last route I want to take. My plan was I-70 to Silverthorne, then CO 9 to US 40. I wondered how long the app would keep telling me to turn around. It gave up around Colfax. In response, it sent me, and, seemingly, dozens of other cars, on a detour around congestion on the Interstate. It took me four cycles to get through one stoplight. I’d have rather stayed on I-70. Yeah, yeah, I should have ignored it like I said I would.

Colorado Highway 9 passes by Green Mountain Reservoir. There isn’t any water in it. I don’t mean it was low. The only water in it was a largish puddle at the dam. After the junction with US 40 in Kremmling, the road passes Wolford Mountain Reservoir. This is also dry. It’s not uncommon over the years to see reservoirs quite low; this was shocking.

By now, I had finally bent the navigation app to my will2. Almost. It tried to pull the “shortcut around the town” stunt in Vernal and cheat me out of lunch. This great time-saving manoeuvre was not a time-saver because two oversized loads blocked the intersection for three cycles of the light. When I could finally make a right turn on red to grab a sandwich at Jimmy John’s, I sent the navigator app into a paroxysm of rerouting beeps.

At Duchesne, the unexpected happened. Navigator sent me onto Utah routes to bypass Strawberry and Heber City; backroads to within a few miles of I-80. Utah Route 35 is a lovely road with sweeping turns, almost no traffic, and pleasant mountain scenery. At one point, I came across a herd of sheep on the road, directed by three dogs, but no human I could see. The dogs had their charges across the road in no time.

Back in civilization, in Kamas, I came within a hundred yards of joining a group of Lotus, but my low fuel light came on, and I stopped to refuel. I gassed up in Kremmling, 338 miles earlier. It was only another 38 miles to the hotel. I’d have made it with more than a gallon left in the tank – I got 41.3 miles to the gallon on that tank.

Good fuel economy despite the car not running quite right. In the wake of the engine swap, I was getting occasional check engine lights for misfire codes. Last week, Michael and I replaced the spark plugs and ignition coils. But now the misfires are no longer occasional. The idle is very rough, but it never stalled. And at low RPMs, the misfire was quite noticeable.

I pulled into the hotel parking lot a few minutes after 5, a bit over nine hours of travel time. I got checked in with the hotel and got checked in with LUG, just in time to have dinner and a couple of beers with other Lotus enthusiasts.

  1. In its defense, it was the most intense part of the storm, and I pulled into a parking lot for a few minutes when it started to hail. The Interstate would have been crazy, so the detour was a good thing. ↩︎
  2. Not really. By now, this was the only route option until close to SLC. ↩︎

LOG 43

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Lotus Ltd. is the national Lotus owners club. Each year, a local chapter hosts the Lotus Owners Gathering, or LOG. LOGs often include autocross or track days. There is a Concours d’Elegance, technical sessions, organized scenic drives in the area, and dinners with notable and interesting guest speakers. LOG 43 was held in Austin, TX.

We made a left turn off the main road and went up a narrow lane. This was the end of one map segment and the start of another. My phone, mounted at arm’s length, displayed a dialog box: end trip or continue? I can’t take my eyes off the road, and working from memory as much as sight, stabbed at what I thought was “Continue”. After a few seconds, the phone went dark. Dang.

I was second to last in the train. I hadn’t seen the front of the line in quite some time. The M100 Elan was behind me, and I was following two Esprits, one red, one black. The M100 had been tail-end Charlie all day, not always able to comfortably keep up with the crowd. The two Esprits are generally more interested in viewing the scenery than ripping through it. Still, they accelerated up and over a small hill. I lagged a bit, hoping to see the Elan make the turn. But I had to either keep up, or find a place to stop and reset navigation. So I caught the Esprits.

This is the second day of our drive, and yesterday we drove 550 miles. It was warm, and I have no A/C. I’d really like to relax. I never got the route book. On the first morning, I got the route for the phone, but I didn’t have time to preview it. I have been over many of the roads we’d be taking, but not all. I didn’t know we were taking a “spirited” detour. I would have skipped it and just gone to the hotel.

I followed the Esprits for quite a while. The road was narrow, bumpy, twisty, and had many driveways for the large properties. The road dropped precipitously for stream crossings, then rose abruptly, then repeated in the next little valley. These crossings are designed to allow water to flow over them in high water conditions. They’re concrete culverts, crenellated, and not high above the creekbeds. Crossing these carrying any speed compresses the suspension, and the surface changes from rough road to smoother concrete. You have to be careful.

I wasn’t comfortable running fast on this road and I was surprised the Esprits both kept it up. We weren’t going super fast – we caught a pickup truck, but he was moving pretty quickly himself. About when I decided to pull over and plot navigation directly to the hotel, we came to a T-intersection. The red Esprit went left, black went right, then pulled over. I followed black, who waved me by. Instead, I parked behind them and worked the phone.

When I looked up, black was gone. I caught up a couple of minutes later. We ran at a sensible speed for some minutes and came to another T-intersection. We parted ways there, them to the left, me to the right. I laughed when I saw them right behind me a couple of miles from the hotel.

We learned later that there were two incidents that we missed. One was our friend the red Esprit. Crossing one of these streams, they hit one of the crenellations and bent a wheel. The other was more serious, I am told. At the same place, a yellow Evora met with disaster. No injuries, but scuttlebutt suggests the car was totalled.

I’ve never organized a club drive, at least not for more than three cars. I have participated in dozens of club drives – one day drives, weekend drives. We’ve had our share of mechanical issues but never any accidents. I’d be mortified if anything like this happened on a drive I led. I think that back road was a poor route choice, given how long everybody had been driving.

I was at the back of the pack, going a bit faster than I wanted to go. I enjoy the back roads. I drive them all the time. I enjoy the scenery, I drive down the main streets of dozens of small towns. I see the sights. I’m fine going 5-7 mph over the posted limit. I don’t want to be that guy in the sports car. I like driving my car fast, but I know what “fast” is and I know I can’t do it on the highway.

They were washing cars in the hotel garage. I got in line. A couple of other LoCos were there too. I “brag” all the time that my car is always the dirtiest in the group, so I caught a little grief for getting it washed. Later, I went up to the restaurant on the top floor for drinks, hors d’oeuvres, and conversation. I generally try to meet folks who haven’t heard all my stories, but I was with other LoCos. This is when I heard about the day’s unfortunate incidents.

Saturday morning was the Concours d’Elegance and group photo. These are always an exercise in cat herding to some degree. Organizing the movements of over a hundred vehicles is never simple, but this one involved a 32 mile drive from the hotel to a park on the banks of the Colorado River in Marble Falls. There was some attempt at getting photographs from a Tesla mounted with robots and using a drone to shoot us crossing over a bridge. We were given lots of instructions about hand signals from the Tesla, but I’m guessing only the first few cars in the train were involved in that.

When we got to the park, they sorted us by model. I got a lot of questions about the damage to the clam. For quite a while, until some stragglers arrived, I was the only BRG Elise there. There are always other green Elises. In the end, there were three: two BRG and one metallic. They guy I was parked next to, David, has 178,000 miles on his. His was pristine compared to mine. There were several cars there with stickers for as many tracks as I’ve been to. Even without the giant tape-covered hole in my front clam, my car has the most “patina”. It is very much the beater of the show.

  • Two rows of sports cars
    Emiras and Elises
  • A row of sports cars
    All in a row
  • A man and a woman looking at a race car
    “We can put a passenger seat in it, but it won’t carry many groceries.”
  • Classic sports cars
    Elans

Afterwards, Kevin and I had lunch with a couple of the other guys at the River City Grill, a short walk from the park. While eating I watched the occasional jet-skier stooging around on the river. It was a warm day, and I was happy drinking an iced tea in the air conditioning.

Back at the hotel, I dealt with a couple of errors and omissions. Every trip, I play a game of “what did I forget?” This time it was my tech sheets for the track days. Michael scanned and emailed them to me. I got them printed out, then met Kevin upstairs for drinks.

For dinner, I had the $63 chicken. Tonight’s speaker was automotive journalist Sam Smith. He’s been writing about cars for twenty years, was executive editor at Road & Track for a while. He’s driven just about every interesting car over that time, has done some racing, some television, and so on. It’s not surprising that he owned a Lotus for a while, an Elan. His talk was pretty well-suited to the audience. Preaching to the choir, you might say.

Sunday was a day running laps at Circuit of the Americas. This was put on by Chin Track Days and was not the official LOG 43 track day. A number of us couldn’t resist the pull of driving on a Formula One track.

Sunday night’s dinner was pork. Both dinners included cheesecake for dessert. It’s strictly off the diet, but I enjoyed both of them anyway. Sunday’s speaker was Russell Carr, head of design for Lotus for the last decade or so. After he gave his talk, he took questions from the audience. He worked on the Emira, Evija, Eletre, and Emeya. I’d never heard of the last one. The Emira is out of my price range, the Evija is out of nearly everyone’s price range, and the Eletre is an SUV and so does not interest me. The Emeya is a 4-door. There are many design elements common across the line, and he went through the design decisions behind them. I found it quite interesting.

On Monday, we went to Harris Hill Raceway for the LOG 43 track day.

For the trip back home, I was concerned about time, so I let the phone pick my route. I knew I wouldn’t be spending a ton of time on Interstates, so didn’t select the “no highways” option. I needed to get as far down the road as possible to make Tuesday a reasonable day, so I knew I’d be driving at night, violating another of my rules. On top of that, I’m running with only one headlight now, so I wanted to be as close as possible to my overnight destination. Last time I drove home from Austin, I stayed in Snyder. This time I opted for Abilene, about an hour closer to Austin. Still, if I stayed for my last track session at 4:30, I’d be driving until after 10. So I did what I seldom do: skipped some track time.

I ended up driving in the dark for an hour and a quarter. In that time, my windshield collected more bugs than the entire drive to Austin. I don’t know why so many bugs, but by the time I got to the hotel, vision was a real problem.

There are a few trees around the entrance to the hotel. I don’t know anything about birds. Birds in my yard get quiet after dark, except for owls, which aren’t in my yard very often. The birds in these trees weren’t owls, and they weren’t quiet. I wasn’t getting the full Alfred Hitchcock The Birds vibe, but I thought it was strange. I asked the desk clerk what kind of birds they are. She didn’t know. When I park, I prefer end spots. I nearly made the big mistake of parking in the end spot under one of the trees. Somebody parked their pickup truck there. I don’t know how clean it was when they parked it, but it was covered with birdshit in the morning.

Much of the drive home was on four-lane divided highways, some Interstate, some US routes. I found the Interstate parts fairly miserable. Way too much traffic. On these four-lane stretches, I kept coming across what I call “left-laniacs”, people who can’t seem to see the signs that say, “Keep right except to pass” or the Texas version, “Left lane for passing only”. They cruise for mile after mile in the left lane. Half a dozen times, I’d slowly reel one of these in only to have them switch to the right lane just as I catch them, making me change lanes to go around them. They’ve been in the left lane all day, why move out just when I catch up to them?

Texas isn’t my favorite state to drive through. Parts of west Texas make Kansas and Nebraska downright scenic in comparison.

When I got to Dumas, I had the choice of going straight north on US 287 (through Oklahoma and eastern Colorado) or heading west on US 87 (into New Mexico and up I-25). I prefer the latter, even though it’s more Interstate. But it would have taken me about half an hour longer, and I was past ready to get home. US 287 gets quite a bit of truck traffic. More truck traffic, I think, than any non-Interstate highway I’ve been on. Luckily, the road is fundamentally straight and flat and has a fair number of passing lanes, so it’s easy to pass.

Before I left home on this trip, I was telling people that I expected to get as much as 42 miles per gallon at some point. The drive down wasn’t exactly an economy run. On the way back, I set my pace to be about 5 mph over the limit, and speed limits in Texas are higher, so my revs were up a bit. The closest I got was 39.7 mpg. I still think 42 mpg is possible.

Over the six days of this trip, I drove 2,080 miles on streets, roads, and highways and 234 on the track for a grand total of 2,314 miles.

Colorado Good 2024

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Last weekend was Lotus Colorado’s spring drive. Genae hasn’t been a fan of riding in the Elise since I “upgraded” to solid motor mounts a few years ago. Even though I downgraded half the mounts to stock, she hasn’t been in the car yet, so we drove the land barge Lexus. This allowed us to carry whatever creature comforts we desired, and the Lexus has A/C while the Lotus doesn’t, so there are some advantages. But it’s give-and-take. Having excess cargo and passenger capacity, we were told we’d be the “sweep” car. A few of the cars are quite old; one is older than I am. So if somebody has mechanical issues, we can make sure they’re not abandoned by the side of the road, left to their own devices.

I’m not likely to do this again. The entry list for the weekend had 17 cars on it. I didn’t bother to count how many actually appeared, but 17 was about right. Every time we hit the road, I’d wait until everybody else got going and join the end of the line. As it’s almost impossible to get 17 cars through the same green light, or get on a highway with all 17 cars together, it typically meant that the head of the line was a mile or two down the road before we even got rolling.

On most of our other club drives, whoever was leading the pack would pull over for the occasional scenic spot for a group photo, or even just pull over to get the group back together. That wasn’t how it went on this drive. The leading cars were all in a race to the destination. Even with us exceeding the speed limit by 20 or 25 mph we still lost ground. The worst case was the last day of the drive when we arrived at the restaurant for lunch about 20 minutes after everybody else. We very much felt like we weren’t part of the group. So it goes.

Another difference between this trip and most of the others is that this one was pretty much just driving and eating at restaurants. In the past, we’d stop at various points of interest. We’ve been to the Sand Dunes, the Black Canyon, the Colorado Monument, the Royal Gorge Bridge, and so on. There may have been other trips where we didn’t visit any attractions, but none come immediately to mind.

I’ve never put together one of these drives. I know that it’s not easy, and the organizers put quite a bit of effort into it. I appreciate it. I really do. But I will always retain the right to go our own way for a meal. Apparently, we gave great offense to some when we let them know we’d be skipping the second BBQ meal of the day for an alternative. I like BBQ, but having had it for lunch, I didn’t really want it for dinner, too. We were told that the restaurant had non-BBQ options, but we didn’t really want $40 steaks. Being tail-end Charlie all weekend, then getting grief over not wanting BBQ twice a day detracted a bit from our joy.

It was a beautiful drive. We went over a long list of mountain passes: Cottonwood, Slumgullion, Wolf Creek, Coal Bank/Molas/Red Mountain, McClure, and Independence with the group and Fremont Pass after we peeled off and headed home. The snow on Cottonwood and Independence (which just opened the day before) was eight or ten feet deep.

Sorry I don’t have many photos to include, but these things happen when you can’t stop and smell the roses. (We would have stopped at the top of Independence Pass, but what little of the parking lot got plowed was jam-packed when we got there and there was nowhere to park.)

  • At Wolf Creek Pass
  • Looking south at the west side of Wolf Creek

Barber Trip 6: A Short Break, Then Home

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I took advantage of Jayne and Dan’s gracious hospitality and spent three nights in Atlanta. I enjoyed a couple of nice dinners in the company of charming people, had a couple of much-needed long walks, and enjoyed not driving. I did laundry.

Over five days, I spent 28 hours driving on the highways and another four on the track. And the trip home will be another 27 hours. That’s a stupid amount of seat time.

Although I had no concrete plans for diversions on the trip home, I did have a couple of ideas. On last year’s abortive trip, a trip to Shiloh got scrubbed. But not being able to lock the car makes planning easier. I can’t count on finding another friendly groundskeeper, so diversions were off the menu.

I’m okay with that. My route would avoid interstates until I was a hundred miles from home, split nicely into three nine-hour days, and on two of the three days I gain an hour.

Thursday

I went from Georgia to Alabama, then Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, and, finally, Missouri. Outside of the towns, I could drive at a pace of my choosing, needing to pass only a handful of cars.

The rural South, by which I mean the backroads of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee, is pretty dense with Confederate flags and Trump flags. Today I drove through a lot of country that has been celebrating insurrectionists for generations and is supporting an insurrectionist today.

At the hotel, I thought I was able to lock the car. I had it in a well-lighted spot in the front, but since it locked, I’d rather park in the back, where I could see it from my room. There’s a nice spot, right next to the light pole, in a single spot (as opposed to a duplex spot). An hour after parking it, I drove to get dinner. When I unlocked the car, it started beeping and it beeped until I hit the button again. At the restaurant, I tried to lock it, but it failed again. Okay, it’s fickle.

After dinner, I noticed that I had left my glasses case in the car. So when I stepped outside for a deep breath of relaxation, I grabbed the case and it locked again. Two out of three now!

My room is on the fourth floor. I’m parked in my single spot and there’s a big pickup that’s in the hotel side of his duplex spot, taking both sides. Another pickup pulls into the spot next to the other light pole, but his tailgate is way over the line of his other spot.

About thirty seconds after the couple in the recently arrived truck enter the building, my alarm goes off. Nobody was anywhere near the car. I was just looking at it. I didn’t know how long the alarm would sound, but I hustled out to the parking lot. When I unlocked it, it beeped until I hit the button again. So I’m back to Plan A, leaving it unlocked.

I’m in a La Quinta this time, instead of the usual dives. But even here I can’t win: the light over the sink flashes about once a second. And it flashes once more after you turn it off. Very annoying. The ice machine works.

Today, about the last thirty miles of road were part of my route on the way to Atlanta last year, but in the other direction. This is the short stretch through Illinois between bridges across the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Cool bridges.

Friday

The most enjoyable part of the drive was the first few hours, highlighted by my miles on MO 34. It’s a very nice Lotus Road. Twisty, up and down, left and right, mile after mile. If you’re passing through southeast Missouri, it’s worth considering. I enjoyed a different part of southern Missouri last trip. Looks like Lotus Roads are in abundance here.

I don’t recall seeing either a Confederate flag or a Trump flag today. Lots of signs for lots of gun stores, and nearly as many gun stores as churches.

I’m averaging over 35 mpg.

I was expecting southern Kansas to be much like northern Kansas. Not true. I prefer northern Kansas to southern Kansas. There is more traffic down here. Not so much traffic I couldn’t pick my pace, but I had to make quite a few passes.

In the parking lot at tonight’s motel, I met a bunch of college kids who were on their way to a rocket competition. Their rocket is about seven feet tall. They ran a separation test in the field next to the motel parking lot. It was successful. They didn’t launch it, just tested that the stages separated properly. I asked them if it was their moonshot. They laughed. One guy said it would reach about 15,000 feet. Another corrected him: it’ll go 5,000.

Dinner at Luigi’s. I had the cheese ravioli, a Peroni, and a chocolate cheesecake. It’s downtown. I was going to park in the adjacent lot, but it was metered. It helpfully told me I only needed to pay during the hours listed, but no hours were listed. It’s across the street from the police station, and there are police vehicles parked here. Not having any coins, and noticing that the spot right in front of the restaurant entrance was empty, I parked there. I got to watch people look at the car. I’m sad that people see her damaged like this.

Saturday

I picked up a biscuit sandwich at the fast food joint next to the gas station. In the parking lot was a black pickup truck with a tinted back window. Written on the window in pink and pale blue in a woman’s handwriting, “Why do you support the rapist fraudster insurrectionist?” It might have been “we” instead of “you”. I was surprised to see it. On this trip, I’ve seen a lot of pro-Trump sentiment, nothing pro-Biden, and only this anti-Trump.

Kansas Route 96 isn’t quite arrow-straight and not quite billiard-table flat, but it’s not far off. It’s the antithesis of a Lotus Road. Kansas 96 turns into Colorado 96 at the border, then I pick up US 287 at Eads. 287 has a lot of truck traffic. Thankfully, there are a few passing lanes. I did pass a string of 4 rigs without a passing lane, but they were nose-to-tail.

Summary

I drove in eight states, covering 3,201 highway miles and 293 miles on track for a total of 3,494 miles. I now have 105,848 miles on the car. It had less than 17,000 when I bought it, so I’ve put about 89,000 miles on it. Roughly 20,000 of those miles are on these track-day road trips.

I enjoyed the trip despite the car getting backed into. I keep telling myself it could have happened at Safeway, but it didn’t.

Barber is a wonderful track on fantastic grounds with an impressive museum. I thoroughly enjoyed driving the back roads of America.

Barber Trip 5: Motorcycles

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Two days of hanging around the race track wasn’t enough for me. The Chin event was over, but I still needed to go to the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum.

The museum is best known for its motorcycles. They have over 1600 bikes in their collection, with over 900 on display. But that’s not why I wanted to wander through the place. You see, it also happens to have the world’s largest collection of Lotus race cars. Throw in die-cast cars, wooden toy cars and trucks, outboard boat motors, and a lawn mower and you have a pretty interesting way to spend a few hours.

Whereas the Presidential museums I visited on this trip both opened at 9:00 am, Barber doesn’t let you in until 10. Or so says the sign on the door and their website. I didn’t have anything better to do, so I got there a little early. I was hoping they’d let me drive around part of the perimeter road so I could look for more treasures. There wasn’t anybody at the gate to ask, and they had the road coned off. So I parked at the museum.

To the right of the main entrance, they have a very striking trio of sculptures that make up one piece. Is there a sculpture-oriented word equivalent to triptych? It’s called “The Chase”, and the plaque says it indicates “the super-human power and sense of achievement that one experiences on the track.” They have a smaller version of at least one of the figures on display inside.

After taking a few photos, I started walking back to my car. A guy came out the museum doors and called to me, “Come on in! We’re open!” It was 9:38. This was good news. After the museum, I’m driving to Atlanta. I had been going back and forth about whether I’d have enough time to take the back roads or I’d have to violate Rule #1. Extra time in hand is good.

When I paid for admission, the cashier told me that I was in luck – Indycar was here at the track doing some testing.

They tell everybody to start touring the museum from the top down. Take the elevator up to the fifth floor, then walk down the spiral ramp to each lower floor.

The number of motorcycles there is ridiculous. I’m not particularly interested in motorcycles, so I was a bit overwhelmed. Bikes from World War II, Italian Vespas, a bike with a wooden sidecar. I wandered randomly, perhaps working down to the cars a bit quicker than I should have.

  • The Chase
  • Lotsa Lotus
  • Model Lotus
  • Vincent Lawnmower. “Vincent” as in “Vincent Black Lightning”
  • Hanging Lady
  • Graham Rahal
  • Marcus Armstrong
  • Dragonflies
  • Fittipaldi fire

I’ve seen large numbers of Lotus before. At the two LOGs I attended, we had more than a hundred, almost all of them road cars. At the F1 race I attended, they had a bunch of classic Lotus F1 cars that ran in a vintage race. But the collection at Barber is impressive for its breadth. I don’t think any of it was post-Chapman, and a few of the very earliest models were reproductions, but they damn near had one of everything that raced. They even had the bicycle.

After checking out the Lotus collection, I wandered out toward the track. From the museum, you can go across the first bridge (the second when you’re on the track), down to a path through the woods in the infield, and then up to the second bridge (the bridge with the hanging lady). The bridges have clear sections in the walkway – you can look straight down onto the track.

Indycars do a lap here as fast as 1:06. That means, if I were to be on the track for a half-hour session with an Indycar, he’d pass me nine or ten times.

I chatted with a couple of guys who come to the Indycar race every year. They said, “You can’t see it from here, but over there,” they pointed vaguely to the woods, “some big ants are carrying off a motorcycle.” Then we got to see Pietro Fittipaldi’s car catch on fire. He was frantically waving his arms for somebody to come to extinguish the fire, but it took a couple of minutes for the trucks to start rolling. He’s the grandson of Lotus F1 champ Emerson Fittipaldi.

After stopping by the gift shop to buy the obligatory t-shirt, I hit the road. I had plenty of time to take the back roads for a pleasant drive through the Alabama and Georgia countryside. I didn’t have much traffic until the last forty minutes or so, as I got near Atlanta.

If you’re a motorcycle lover or a fan of Lotus, the museum is worth the visit.

Barber Trip 4: Raison d’être

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I figured that it would be my luck that it would rain the entire weekend. After all, the track day gods have been, for more than a year, testing my resolve to run laps at Barber. Last year’s broken windshield and electrical problems and this year’s trailer hitch into my front clam and now my inability to lock the car. It would be trivial for the track day gods to park a rain cloud over the track.

Saturday was overcast most of the day. I saw my shadow for about 15 minutes. Overcast, but not threatening rain. There was much discussion in the paddock about the forecast for Sunday. I’d rather it not rain, but I won’t have any say in the matter so I don’t obsess about it. I had two people show me Sunday forecasts that were quite different. Some said rain at 3:00 pm, others said rain at 7:00 am. It did rain on Sunday, but it was over before 6:00 am.

Driving on the wet pre-dawn roads to the track, I couldn’t know that the weather would be good. I had been joking about the track day gods testing my resolve, exacting a heavy toll. The gods didn’t bring another deluge down upon my head, but they weren’t done with me yet. A quarter of a mile from the entrance to the facility, my check engine light came on.

I texted a screenshot of the code to my trusted advisors, cleared the code, and went on with my business. It’s an O2 sensor. The code hasn’t come back.

This is my third event with Chin Track Days, with a two-day event at Mid-Ohio and last year’s aborted run at Road Atlanta being the others. This experience taught me a few things. First is that Chin Events are more expensive than most. On a per-day basis, including this trip, my five Chin days are five of the six most expensive events. Only a day at Circuit of the Americas was more.

The second nugget of information, related to the first no doubt, is that the vast majority of cars entered are fast and expensive. I neglected to save a copy of the roster before the event (and Chin won’t share that info with me after the event), but the number of Porsche 911 GT3s and GT4s is off the chart. Average cost per car is higher than any other event I’ve been to, except the Ferrari customer appreciation days.

They put me in the Yellow group. This group includes all the novices and the solo intermediate drivers who haven’t been to this track before. I think It’s the best group for me. Passing is by point-by only, and only on the straights. Other groups are point-by, but passes can be done anywhere. Another advantage to this group is that it could get smaller. After Saturday, some yellow group drivers may graduate to a higher group leaving less traffic for me.

And, theoretically, running with the novices might mean that some of these fast cars won’t be going so fast because the drivers haven’t figured things out yet. A downside might be that novice drivers are struggling to cope with information overload and may not be as attentive as they should be to their rear-view mirrors.

Okay, enough prelude. On to the track.

What a track it is. The first thing I noticed, even in the pre-dawn dark, was that there is art all over the grounds. It’s mostly sculptures, from a giant woman soaking in a pond, to a bear in the woods, to trolls peeking out from under drain covers. There are impressions of leaves in the concrete like fossils, there’s a skunk on the stairs, there are giant dragonflies and metal insects. There’s a small herd of bison in the infield being hunted by some big cats. And a giant spider. Three different people told me “Barber is the Augusta of race tracks!” I’m not a golf fan, so the allusion is lost on me, but if everybody says it, it must be true!

  • Hunting party
  • Lounging in the pond
  • Look under the stairs!
  • Sleepy cat
  • Sasquatch
  • Testing my resolve
  • Optimal

Each day at a Chin event, the first session is open to drivers from all run groups. It’s a yellow-flag session, no passing allowed, to allow folks, especially those of us new to the track, to familiarize ourselves with the track and locate all the corner workers.

Two pedestrian bridges cross the track. I later walked across these bridges when I visited the museum. On my first lap of the yellow-flag session, I spotted the hanging lady under the first bridge. It’s a mannequin, and she’s hanging by her arms underneath the bridge. It was a little jarring, given the lynched doll I spotted hanging over the road yesterday in Mississippi. For just an instant, it freaked me out.

After that session, one of the other drivers asked me if I’d seen her. Of course I did! He told me that he ran an entire day without spotting her. He didn’t know about her until one of his friends asked him at the end of the day if he’d seen her. How can you go under that bridge 40 or 50 times in a day without noticing? Is it an unintentional test of a driver’s observational skills?

There are a couple of other notable mannequins on the track. There are two of them sitting on the wall where the cars enter the pits. I’m not sure if one of the mannequins is pushing the other off the wall or not. I’ll admit to another quick feeling of shock when I first saw them.

I have a practice of walking through the paddock looking for other Lotus drivers. For a short while, four of us were registered but two canceled. The only other Lotus was a blue 2005 Elise. I chatted briefly with the owner. He’s an instructor, his car is supercharged (265hp, he tells me), and he’s running on slicks. I tried to track him down a couple of times on Sunday, but we never reconnected. I was going to jokingly ask him if I could run a few laps on his slicks.

As usual, I’m running on my hard street tires. I get a lot of grief about it. Not so much grief on these road trips, but most track rats make it sound like they run on slicks or not at all. I’m not racing, so I don’t really care how my lap times compare to others. I’m competing with myself. How close to “maximum performance” can I get? For me, the skill is getting as close to the edge of performance as I possibly can. With hard tires, you get to the edge at a slower speed.

This weekend, though, I think I’d have been happier on stickier tires. There were only two cars in my group that were slower than I was. I looked at all the videos to count how often I was passed, but I did count passes in one session: I got passed 13 times and made 3 passes. If that was a typical number of passes in a session, and it was, over the course of 8 sessions I was passed well over 100 times.

Every time I pointed somebody by, it cost me about a second. Getting passed on the front straight compromises two laps. To get a decent time, I needed a “clean” lap – neither passing nor being passed. Because I was so slow, I got passed nearly every lap. Some of the Porsches were fast enough that I didn’t need to get off the throttle to let them by, but there were so many of them, I couldn’t always tell before the pass if I had to lift.

Had I been on my track wheels/tires, I reckon I’d have been 6 or 8 seconds a lap faster. That would have been fast enough to get me quite a few more clean laps. Cars that passed me twice would have only caught me once. And I’d have sometimes gotten an extra lap.

I didn’t have a target lap time in mind. My goal is constant improvement: to be faster in my last session than in my first. This I achieved: my fastest lap of the weekend was my very last lap. And that lap was compromised by letting a Porsche pass me on the front straight. Even with these tires, given a few extra clean laps, I might have reached a 1:50 lap time. Tall order, yes, as my best was a 1:53. But in one session, my timer said my optimal time was 1:49.

In addition to my eight sessions as a member of the Yellow group, each day ended with “happy hour” where people from any session could run. I joined in near the end of the session, thinking there’d be fewer cars. I lasted only 2 or 3 laps each day. On Saturday, I was getting passed left and right without giving point-bys. That didn’t happen on Sunday, so I’m guessing somebody mentioned it. In any event, the other cars were just too fast for me to enjoy myself and it was clear I stood no chance of getting a clean lap. So it goes.

Here are some more photos, including the giant spider.

  • Charlotte
  • The Exxon Valdez

I had a great time. I spent two days hanging out with people who share a common passion. Everybody played nice on the track. Nobody bumped into anything, but there was one red flag. A brand new Toyota Corolla GR lost its oil drain plug in turn 15 and spilled oil all the way down the main straight and into turn 1, where he spun out on his own oil. I’m guessing the track charged him four figures for the oil-dry they had to deploy.

Here’s the obligatory lap video.

Barber Trip 3: Insecurity

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Today’s diversion is a visit to the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum. It doesn’t open until 9:00, so I could sleep in a little.

The free breakfast cost too much. Yesterday, at the bad motel, at least I got a bagel with cream cheese. This morning, no such luck. My choices were cold cereal or yogurt with lots of sugar. I tried the biscuits and sausage gravy. The biscuits were hard. The sausage gravy may have been vegan. After two bites, I tossed it. The woman at the next table made eye contact with me, chuckled, and nodded.

After the non-breakfast I headed out, stopping to fill the tank on my way to the museum. I got there just as the doors opened. There was just one problem, though: I couldn’t lock the car. It acted like it locked, it made the right noises in the right sequence, but after a few seconds, the alarm gave a steady beep. I’m pretty sure that’s what it does if I try to lock it with the boot open, or a door. I opened and closed the doors and boot lid and tried again with the same result.

That’s just great. I have the passenger seat and footwell filled with stuff including a laptop, some tools, and all the cameras. In theory, I could repack the car to have the valuables in the boot, but something will still be in the unlocked cabin. When I’m just driving around town, I almost never lock it, as I often have the top off, and I seldom carry anything. But road trips are a different kettle of fish.

After my third unsuccessful round of opening and closing the doors and boot lid, one of the groundskeepers rolled up in his cart. He asked the usual questions about the car, including “What kind of car is it?”. He was not the first I’ve talked to on this trip who’d never heard of Lotus and would not be the last. I answered all his questions, then told him that I was having trouble locking it.

He said, “Go visit the museum. I’m going to be working right over here all morning cleaning up from the storm. I’ll keep an eye on it.” That was very kind of him. I have a blue tarp that I use to keep everything on the passenger side covered up.

I have no idea why it’s failing. One possibility is damage from the collision. I don’t think that’s the case, but it’s possible. Another is something’s wet. I drove through 3 hours of rain, and it rained most of the night, so who knows? My tape job is holding up to the weather, still looking good. I think I have enough tape left to redo it if I have to.

  • The Clinton Presidential Park bridge crosses the Arkansas River
  • Bill’s ride
  • Bill’s WFH office
  • What Bill did on my 34th b-day
  • Each globe has a theme

The Clinton Museum is the largest of the National Archives Presidential Museums. At least, according to the Clinton Museum folks. They admit that Reagan’s is bigger if you include the hanger that holds Air Force One and Marine 1. Not that it matters who’s is bigger.

The grounds here are pretty nice, but the rain had started up again so I didn’t wander around. One of the things a President has to do these days when he gets the job is to decide where he’s going to be buried. While I was looking out an upper-story window at the grounds, a worker pointed out where Bill and Hillary will reside after shuffling off this mortal coil.

When I visit these Presidential museums, I always look for a life-sized statue so I can get a selfie. Ike was on a pedestal, and I figured it would be poor form to climb it for a photo. There is no statue of Clinton here.

The price I paid for going to the museum was having to trade some back roads for interstate. My route started with sixty miles of interstate and ended with another hundred and fifty, making it just a tad over half the total mileage. Had I taken interstates the whole way, I’d have saved a few minutes but gone farther, going through Memphis. The middle section took me through the backwoods of Mississippi.

It was still raining when I got off the superslab. The first thing I noticed was that there wasn’t nearly as much standing water as on the interstate. The two-lane roads are crowned much better, with water flowing from the middle out. Much better drainage than the interstate. And with so much less traffic, I wasn’t constantly driving through somebody else’s spray.

I crossed the Mississippi River on US 49, over an impressive old girder bridge. I’d have loved to have stuck the 360 camera out the window, but it was raining. Too, the road on the bridge is in rough shape. It was definitely two-hands-on-the-wheel rough.

Just as on many of my other trips, I saw quite a few flooded fields. Is it always flooding somewhere in the Midwest when I’m driving through, or is it just where I go?

I was on a mix of roads, from four-lane divided highway down to a stretch of state highway with neither speed limit signs nor a centerline. Once the rain stopped, it was a pleasant drive.

This narrowest, least-traveled road alternated between small cultivated fields and stands of trees. There were quite a few run-down, abandoned-looking shacks along the road. Where the road went through the woods, the trees made an archway over the road. In one place where trees arched the road, I spotted a doll hanging in a tree, lynched. Right above my head. Maybe two feet tall. I couldn’t tell if the doll was black. I have a guess based on nothing more than stereotypes.

I was surprised at the lack of restaurants on my backroads drive. I had the same thing last year in Missouri, but I was on a number of county roads. Today, I was on state routes and US highways – no county roads. I was in this foodless zone from about eleven to after two. Maybe I was still feeling good from last night’s steak, but I wasn’t particularly hungry for any interstate fast food. I powered on to the motel.

The last two hours of the drive were dry. I basically ran a 75-mile-an-hour blow-dryer on the car for two hours. I still can’t lock the car. This does not bother me at all until my return trip. But I don’t think I’m comfortable leaving everything in an unlocked car while I wander around the Shiloh battlefield and Indian mounds. I doubt I’ll be able to count on the kindness of groundskeepers to keep an eye on my car. Driving back with no diversions means I’d be able to trade more interstate for back roads.

Dinner was at a little Mexican place next to the motel. It’s in a former fast-food building. There’s parallel parking where the drive-thru was. The place was busy, and it seemed like everybody knew each other. I had a chimichanga and a beer.

Barber Trip 2: The Deluge

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The first order of business was to find a hardware store that might have some heavy-duty clear waterproof tape so I could make a “repair”. Abilene has no Home Depot or Lowes, but there is an old-school hardware store downtown. I’m trying to think of the last time I set foot in a hardware store that wasn’t part of a giant chain. The building was probably 125 or 150 years old. They had some T-Rex tape which fit the bill perfectly.

Downtown Abilene is a pile of brick buildings a couple of blocks deep on the north side of about a quarter of a mile of railroad tracks. Ike’s place is a few blocks away on the other side of the tracks.

The Eisenhower Museum is the fourth Presidential Museum I’ve been to. Turns out, you can get a National Archives passport and get it stamped at the museums. I’ve been to three of the first four. I mentioned this to the ticket taker, adding, “I’ve been to Monticello, too.”

“That’s just a residence,” she sniffed.

The museum itself is about on par with Hoover and Truman. World War II gets the most emphasis, with a pretty good general overview of the war in Europe and North Africa.

I don’t know how many of the Museums have the gravesites on the grounds. Ike and Mamie are in a little chapel next to the visitor’s center. It’s not really a chapel, though. Officially it’s the Place of Meditation. His boyhood home is there as well, but I didn’t tour it.

These days it seems each President is set on making a grander statement with his library than any of his predecessors, so the modern ones are in “statement” buildings surrounded by elaborate grounds. The buildings here are old school – utilitarian, brick, more modern than downtown Abilene, but not out of place. The grounds, too, are not great. The lawn is brown, and there’s not much more than lawn. It looks barren.

They’re working on the road in front of the grounds, and the fountain in front of the chapel is being renovated. There’s a sign to that effect, but the sign is the only sign of renovation.

Exiting the museum parking lot, I headed south on KS 19 to start my great zig-zag, south then east, south then east to Little Rock.

  • Also in the motel parking lot
  • My tape repair
  • The Eisenhower residence, now ADA compliant!
  • Ike’s wartime Cadillac
  • Model of the Normandy Mulberry Harbor
  • Khruschev’s portable liqour cabinet
  • Really? (A campaign button)
  • Ike stands proud
  • Ike lies in peace

Most of the day was spent on back roads, but the last three hours were on the Interstate. It was the longest stretch of Interstate for the whole trip. It was harrowing. I don’t know if it was the same storm that dropped a foot and a half of snow at home, but for three hours I drove through rain. Torrents of rain. It was a Biblical storm. I ran the wipers on full-blast, with the defogger on high. Sheets of water ran across the road. A light car with big tires is a good recipe for hydroplaning. Quite often, the car would be a boat for ten or fifteen feet. I wasn’t the slowest vehicle on the road, but it was close. When the big rigs passed me, they threw up so much spray I couldn’t see the cabs of the trucks.

One particularly memorable moment came on a slight bend to the left. The whole road was banked, and water ran in sheets across it. The water wasn’t just ten or fifteen feet across. It looked endless. I added steering angle, but the car kept going straight. It seemed to take forever.

Other drivers were having difficulty, too. There was a jack-knifed big rig on the other side of the highway, then an SUV in the center median, and then three or four emergency vehicles all on the other side.

In the middle of this maelstrom, Google Maps decided I needed to concentrate on navigation instead of the weather. It directed me to get off the Interstate. It didn’t seem right to me, but I obeyed our AI overlords. In the end, it sent me on a six-mile loop back to the same spot that I got off the Interstate. Why the heck did it do this? Does Maps hallucinate now?

Oddly, this may have been a good thing. The storm was getting worse, but now I was going slower and could find a safe place to pull off the road if need be. It started to hail. My defogger could no longer keep the inside of the windshield clear. I pulled over and stopped. I had paper towels with me, so I dried the inside of the windshield. Four or five times.

The rain finally mellowed considerably, and I got back on the interstate, but it didn’t stop until I was close to the motel. It was an intense and exhausting drive.

After checking in to the motel, I wanted a beer. So I walked across a couple of parking lots to the Outback Steakhouse and had a “tall blonde” (a 22 oz. blonde ale), a petite filet with a loaded baked potato, and a house salad. The meal was nearly as much as my room for the night.

Not long after I got back to the motel, the rain started again and tornado sirens started to wail. I checked the news for information and learned that there had been a tornado a few hours earlier, near my route. Fun stuff!

When I went to the car at 9:15, the tornado sirens were wailing again. The rain really started coming down at around 10; more thunder and lightning. Probably the same band of storms I drove through, only now getting here.

Barber Trip 1: Malfunction Junction

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Most of the first day was on US 36, which I’ve done several times now. When I drive cross-country, I generally listen to podcasts. There’s a guy I listen to who likes to make 6-hour long episodes about history. Today’s episode was part two of two about the Vikings, Halfway through it, I realized I had listened to part one on this same road on last year’s trip. I’ve probably just developed a weird association between Kansas and the Vikings.

I spent the first night in Abilene, Kansas, in a room with a view of the onramp for eastbound I-70.

I brought a small cooler full of soft drinks that I figured I’d be able to fill with ice every morning at my motel and have cold drinks for the day. “Man plans, God laughs!” Not here, Bucko, the ice machine is out of order. A sign taunts me: “Working hard to fix this problem” They dated it. They’ve been working hard on it for nearly a year. It’s the worst motel room I’ve ever had.

After being in the car all day, I didn’t want to drive anywhere and I wanted to walk. There was an Arby’s across the street, so I hoofed it over there. There are no crosswalks or sidewalks, of course. Although I was crossing a four-lane divided road without a crosswalk, I wasn’t defying death: the four-lane road has almost no traffic, even though it’s an I-70 interchange.

Everything in sight is run down.

  • Tornado Alley
  • Working Hard
  • Misspelled Self-Portrait

I didn’t want to walk up to the drive-through (which I’ve done at my bank) so I went to the Burger King next door instead. The service was slow at BK so the gal who filled my order upgraded my fries and drink. I wasn’t going to take the upgraded drink until I realized I could fill this giant cup up with ice and put it in my cooler.

That Sinking Feeling

After watching some TV, I went out to the car to grab my water bottle.

I had parked my car in a spot that guaranteed that everybody saw it. It was well-lit, and everybody who came into the parking lot swept it with their headlights. It was a very good example of the exact opposite of invisible. Nobody could not see it. And yet…

My heart sank when I walked out the door. Somebody had backed into my car. No note under my wiper. From the damage, it was obviously done by a truck with a trailer hitch. A woman was parked in the handicapped spot next to me, but she’d only been there a few minutes to make a phone call and didn’t see it happen.

I went back inside and talked to the desk clerk. He said he’d have a look at the security camera footage and went into the back room. A few minutes later he returned, saying he couldn’t access the camera footage as he didn’t have the password.

We went outside and looked around the parking lot. Most of the vehicles in the parking lot were pickup trucks and most of them had trailer hitches. I found two trucks that were candidates, with hitches at the right height.

As I was taking photos of one of the candidate trucks, a man came toward me. My first thought was that he belonged to the truck I just photographed and was going to give me grief about taking pictures. I was wrong. He asked if I was the owner of “the green car”. He said he was the one who backed into it. I took photos of his truck, proof of insurance, and driver’s license. “It was dark; I didn’t see your car.” I have no words.

Yes, I’m in a cheap motel. But this could have happened in any parking lot.

I had difficulty falling asleep, and when I woke up for a bathroom break, I couldn’t get back to sleep. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.