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.

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.