Ridin the Bus or Van City Blue Miata Gets Political

Before I could transfer the insurance from the wounded Miata back to the non wounded Infiniti I had to go to work, so with no car I had to take the bus. Not having ridden the bus for a long time I made a few observations:

1 - It takes too long. Normally by car in the morning it takes about five to fifteen minutes to get to work, twenty minutes in the afternoon with traffic. It took an hour by bus. And I had to wait in the rain. Ouch. Even with right of way and bus specific lanes the thing is slow.

2 - The bus company has a weird sense of humour. On the bus stop sign there's a number and if you call it and give the stop number, a robot will tell you when the next bus will be coming. This must of cost a fortune to set up. The funny thing is, that it tells you this is an estimate only, so it actually tells you that it's useless. And it was; my bus came nowhere near the time it estimated. At least it was way earlier rather than later. If you didn't ride the bus and if you weren't charged transit taxes on your gas (the highest in Canada) to pay for these "services", this would be kind of funny. Oh another kind of funny thing, a robot on the bus calls out the next stop in case you don't like looking out the window; I hope that cost like a million dollars.

3 - You have time to think on the bus. This was the nice thing. While the bus droned its way from stop to stop I had time to reflect on what I had done. Basically I'm a very lucky bastard. I could have spun out and hit another car or lamp post or human, and that would have been end of story. After all suspension pieces are relatively cheap compared to body damage and insurance premiums. So I should count my blessings and stop being such an idiot.

4 - There are no really hot girls on the bus. If you look at photos from a few posts ago about my trip to White Rock you'll notice that in the one passenger seat of the Miata was a really hot girl. I noticed that in not one of the twenty or so seats in the four buses I rode today, was the same. The bus just doesn't attract hot girls, the Miata does. What the bus does attract is lots of people that looked sickly and downtrodden. Not a judgement but an observation.

I guess I've learnt two things from my brief brush with public transit: 1. I love my cars, I really really love everything about them. 2. As a society money spent on talking robobusses, traffic calming, and shiny bus stops so tourists say Vancouver is pretty, would be better spent helping people who ride the bus by necessity, be able to ride that bus by choice.

Oh wait I learnt three things: Slow down, a bit. Well actually: Don't power slide in traffic.

Tragedy

This is supposed to be the happy blog post where I get to tell you that the Miata is back, successfully insured for daily summer service. It won't be.

Another grey and dreary day in this June that seems to be determined to break the record for being the coldest and with the least days of sun finally broke my will. If the weather wasn't going to cooperate I was at least going to pretend like it was. The offers on the Infiniti were few and far between and too low to make selling it a reasonable idea. So I decided to keep it as the winter car and this meant that I could transfer the registration to the Miata and park the Infiniti for the summer. A quick trip to the Aircare money grab, a stop at the insurance broker to transfer the plates, and the Miata was ready to go. I was so happy and the sun even came out. Unfortunately my happiness whipped me into a joy filled idiot frenzy. With a huge grin on my face I zipped off in the Miata and promptly crashed it.

Trying to power-slide while making a yellow light left turn (does it get any dumber than this?) I lost control of the rear-end and spectacularly spun out into the curb bending the front suspension. My Miata summer, over in all of five minutes of adrenaline fuelled driving.

The Miata is back home in the garage. I'll asses the damage and hopefully it can be fixed. The sun might shine again.

Update

Here's some photos I took in my garage:

You can see the wheel is not where it's supposed to be in the wheel well
There's not a lot of damage to the wheel and the tire might be okay
This is a nice view of the front suspension and all the damage. I've labelled it appropriately. The lower control arm got the worst of it.
Here's a view from above. The strut is supposed to be in the centre of that opening.
Now I've got to take all that bent stuff out and get new stuff to put in....

Romantic, Special, and Fun

A few weeks ago the stars aligned themselves, I had a day off, my girlfriend had a day off, I had some money in my bank account, and most importantly the sun was shining and it was hot. A perfect day for a Miata road trip. I insured the car for the day and we drove down to beautiful Crescent beach in White Rock, BC. The whole time in the back of my mind I imagined the crank case pulley popping off and stranding us, but a beer and some fish and chips quickly dissipated any worries. It was a great time; we hung out, watched the sailboats, cruised, and afterwards drove to the Richmond casino to lose some money, finishing off the day with a nice view of the sunset on the Richmond dike. Like the pumpkin in that story the Miata had to go back to it's garage because it's insurance ran out at midnight. Angela put it best when she said that we could have done the trip in our regular cars but going in the Miata made it romantic, special, and fun. She gets it.

I noticed a lot of cowl shake and extremely firm ride on the highway, more than usual. Great, now the body is coming apart too I thought, but it turns out that I forgot to return the tire pressure to normal levels after I had pumped them up for storage. Oops. Gotta remember to do that next time.