The thread for all interesting and/or humorous tidbits that occur in Madison this weekend for the rest of us who couldn't make the trip!

Hi Marc:

___I believe JimboK. and Tom have mobile wireless so we will keep everyone up to date the best we can. Especially Friday with the FE challenge live

___Good Luck

___Wayne

I may bring my laptop and see if there's open wireless around, and do some posting when I'm not running around like crazy

Yep, got it fired up as we speak. Sort of surprised to pick up this good a signal at a campground in rural PA. Guess it's close enough to Pittsburgh to land in that footprint.

I'll have my Palm Lifedrive with Bluetooth so, if there is open WiFI, I can check to see if the lights are on at CleanMPG.

Well, okay, that's cool.. but rather than meta-chat about how
one can blog, I'm gonna actually document some trip stuff!
.
Haven't processed any pix yet, so there's no page, but just
some notes from the past couple of days. Oh, right -- I have
also basically just landed at Wayne's place, and was immediately
handed some excellent food and took a shower and feel vaguely
human again after dukin' it out in the heat all day.
.
Tuesday was when I took off; was holding a fairly satisfactory
62.something for some of the morning but then as I got into
the western Mass hills and the wind kicked up, I eventually
arrived in Buffalo only showing 58.3 avg. Part of that was from
trying yet another theory about highway MPG, which evidently
doesn't work very well and I sorta expected. Today, on the
other hand, I took off early in the morning again on a fresh
tank and crested 62 fairly soon and held it for a while, but
then later as I was really tuned into all the subtle conditions
going on around me it felt like the car was just sort of
slogging a little bit -- slower for the same power output,
etc. Then I thought to look at the trees. Yup, headwinds
again. So a couple of factors have been working against me:
wind, the 100 extra pounds of Prius transmission parts and my tent
and other crap, possibly crap second-tier gas from Tuesday's
fillup, and maybe the Hydroedges. Which, I'll add, are up to
like 55 psi at this point. But today was better -- despite
all that I managed to just barely nurse a 61 all afternoon and
after getting into some pulse-n-warp-stealth action on I-294
going around Chicago managed to crest 62 again just before
filling up about half an hour from Wayne's place.
.
Anyways, Billy and I are comparing notes and settling in and
[I just discovered] waiting for another couple of arrivals
tonight, so the party's definitely kickin' into gear here.
Tomorrow a bunch of us are apparently going to head for the
cruise-in near Madison; that oughta be fun and I've got a
couple of entertaining surprises for it. Then y'all can kick
my ass in the MPG competition the next day...
.
Hopefully the prius-tech rundown thing will go okay. Cramming
10 hours of slides into one isn't easy, and all of my talk-
to-the-wall rehearsals to date have gone closer to two. So
I'm gonna be glossin' over a whole lot of stuff, I'm afraid,
but hopefully get to the meat of the magic -- as advertised!
.
Gotta go whack on some pictures and start forming that thread.
.
_H*

Great write up.

We are all looking forward to meeting up with you cross-country travelers tomorrow at the cruise in! Official cruise in hours are from 5-9. See you there!!!

Yesterday, Dan drove 250 miles from Houston to Dallas, got 2 hours of sleep, then from 3am Wed to 10:30pm made it to Wayne's house in Chicago. First extended drive in a Prius - helped get the trip mpg to about 60mpg. Starting to understand warp stealth, glides and such.

Greetings from southern China, I guess I'll be missing this event! Looking forward to reading all about it here.

Somebody set xcel's parking brake, to 'level the playing field'.

DAS

3AM Thursday morn:
I'll be leaving Oklahoma shortly. Probably won't make it to Madison for the drive in tonight at Hotrods and Hybrids, just don't know. Looks like I may drive through a storm front up in northern Kansas. I'm going to try going straight north on US 77 to Sioux City, then across Iowa to Dubuque. Billy has set the bar pretty high at 107mpg, in his red Insight,for the trip to Wayne's house from the west coast. Thanks a lot Billy

Randall