To Molly Wherever I May Find Her

It seems I've been remiss with respect to my reading audience. Yesterday, I received a plaintive message from Molly the cat who said she really only reads to see the luscious hunka mancat meat that often makes an appearance. I'm here to remedy that right now.

It's easy to see why Molly would be smitten with him, isn't it? Just look at those paws of steel and those gorgeous green bedroom eyes. He's a gentleman too. He's completely ceded his former territory to Miss Sadie. As for Miss Sadie, she has a blanket there for softness, but she prefers to scrunch in behind it so that only her ears show.

There seems to be a problem of paw dominance cubby conundrum when Smitty tries climbing up on the right side of the slide-out. Instead, he climbs up on the left side and then walks across. (We removed the wall of separation several days ago.)

Yesterday evening, he was able to get outside for a short walk. It's a scary place, however, with lots of people and cars driving by. We waited until the place had mostly shut down for the night, but he was still nervous and stayed pretty much in among the date palms.

When Sadie came to the door to watch, he decided he'd rather be inside with her.

Sadie, open the door, woudja?

As for the driving part of the day, it was my day to do a ride-along with one of Mike's instructors. After lunch, we headed over to the classroom.

These are just some of the C7 Corvettes parked outside.

This was Mike's car for the morning. He switched to the blue car #28 later in the afternoon when I did my ride-along. 

And what a wild ride that was! The students go out in groups of four or five with an instructor in the lead, and so I was out with them when they did their laps, doing all the things they did at the speeds they were doing them. This is Paul, the instructor I rode with. He was young and cute, and I was tempted to ask him if his mother knew where he was.

Despite his youth, I felt completely comfortable in the car with him, figuring he'd rounded the track a zillion times or more. When I was strapped into the passenger seat, this is what I could see.

Here's the console. For the passenger's comfort, there are hand-holds on both sides of the car. I've indicated the one for the left hand with a red arrow, and there was another on the door for my right hand. I hung on for dear life because that those speeds, the g-force causes one to be thrown around the car's interior. Also, I was wearing a helmet, and so I had my head resting against the seat back to keep my neck comfortable.

Here's a map of the course. If you look in the upper left corner, you'll see it's color coded to tell the students how to negotiate the turns using throttle vs. breaking vs. balance.

This is Ron Fellows, the race car driver I mentioned earlier. Mike said he isn't always there, and so it was something of a privilege to get to meet him and hear him talk about racing. Mike asked him which race he was most proud of winning, and he replied it was the 2001 Daytona 24-hour race. Apparently they'd lost the 24-hour race the year before by just 30 seconds, and so the win a year later was all the sweeter. For that win, he was awarded a Rolex watch, and he pulled up his sleeve to show it.

He is considered a racing legend, and Mike said he was a very nice and humble man.

For those of you interested in this sort of thing (and if you understand the terminology), the cars have a 460 HP V-8 engine with a 7-speed manual transaxle in the rear. Mike tells me their performance is on par with race cars of ten years ago. 

As for the ride, it was great fun and quite a thrill. I enjoyed seeing what Mike was seeing. When I could relax my eyeballs enough to take them off the road, I could look at the speedometer. We were traveling at 101 mph in the straightaways and between 45-65 in the curves, depending on where we were on the track. Also, I could look in my side mirror and see Mike following behind us. Occasionally, I heard some knocking in the rear of the car. Going around turns so fast, the rear end would break loose a little bit (planned and encouraged). When that happened, the tires would throw off "marbles" of rubber. The students are warned to stay on the road and not venture off into the "marbles" because they cause the car to slip as if one were driving on marbles. 

After my ride, I walked back to the RV. Mike still had hours of class left. Along the way, I calmed myself by taking pictures of every blooming thing. Remember the creosote bushes I mentioned in my last post? Here is an actual creosote bush, nearly bloomed out.

They're easy to recognize by their "snakeskin" bark.

With so much excitement during the ride-along, a nap was in order. 

This seems as good a time as any to talk about the suggested footwear for this activity. Mike is wearing driving shoes. He says they are comfortable. They have a stiff sole for the ball of the foot and they are designed to make heel-toe downshifting possible. Also the pad on the side makes it possible to also hit the throttle. Why one would want to do all three things at the same time is beyond me, but so I'm told. 

This morning when we got up, we saw a couple of vehicles rounding the track...this is essentially the "Zamboni" that cleans up the marbles left on the track from the day before.

As I'm writing this, Mike has gone for his third and final day of driving. We will be staying here overnight and leaving in the morning. In the meantime, I'll be doing some more laundry and cleaning the place up a little bit. We need to do some grocery shopping this evening and then in the morning, Mike wants to get the batteries checked on the fifth wheel. They were very low on water when we left home, and he's concerned they may need to be replaced. We're heading off to the Valley of Fire State Park next, and there's a possibility we'll be dry camping while we're there. We want to be sure our batteries are in good shape.

I didn't get any more sewing done yesterday. Having the ride-along in the middle of the day meant I spent the day being pretty lazy...and that was a good way to spend it too. I was kind of tired. Today I'll have all day, and so I'll get more sewing done. The next Solstice Challenge block is out. It's a large block, and it's going to work great with the fabric I brought along. After that, I'll get back to work on my quilt-along quilt, sandwiching it and doing some quilting for "stablizing" the quilt. That's not something I generally do when I quilt, and so I'll be learning something new.