Must Be Art Weblog

The Marriott Greenville is mostly unremarkable. They have wireless Internet, which is nice. The placard in the room describes it as “secure” and gives a procedure for obtaining an access code. It isn’t secure, and an access code is not required, so I guess they’re not finished deploying it yet.

The restaurant has good service, a short menu (even shorter for the BMW-prepaid dinner), pretty good quality, and somewhat skimpy portions. The climate control was on the fritz so they seated me next to a space heater.

The hotel and surrounding neighborhood are not very friendly to pedestrians. I tried to take a walk, but there is nothing nearby, no sidewalks, no crosswalks, etc. Obviously everybody is supposed to have a car.

Tomorrow the BMW shuttle leaves at 8:15am to take me to the Performance Center for my “exciting hands-on-learning adventure”.

I’m sitting in a Boeing 767-300 in seat 39E, on the way to Atlanta. That’s just the connection, of course, though I suppose there must be people who actually fly to Atlanta. My connection is to Greenville-Spartanburg, South Carolina. If you’re a car buff you’ll recognize that Spartanburg is where BMW has its American factory, and that’s where I’m going. I custom-ordered a Z4 3.0i roadster, and opted for Performance Center delivery. That’s a no-cost option that reallocates the freight and dealer delivery charges to cover the cost of uniting the buyer with a new vehicle right at the factory. It includes a hotel stay, several meals, a factory tour, a museum tour, and a short driving clinic on the Performance Center course in a car similar to the one purchased. It’s not clear to me whether these costs are really comparable to the cost of shipping a car from South Carolina to San Diego, but it seems like it ought to be fun.

The flight is full, but I had no trouble finding stowage for my 40-pound carry-on bag full of camera gear, with a medium-big tripod strapped to the outside. The bag is specialized for photo equipment, with padded sectional dividers inside and the wheels/handle mechanism mounted outside the box where they can’t bash against the delicate equipment inside. I prefer to use this bag when I fly with significant camera gear, because it’s rugged enough to stow as checked baggage if absolutely necessary. On smaller puddle-jumper planes, I sometimes have to gate-check anything bigger than a laptop.

This is the first trip with this particular tripod. It’s a Bogen/Manfrotto 4-section carbon fiber model. I’ve used it locally, of course. It is an amazing combination of light weight and rigidity, thanks to the carbon fiber technology. It needs to be quite rigid to be useful with my Canon EOS 1Ds. Most tripods that can support that much camera are heavy enough to be a burden. This one isn’t. By the time I’ve strapped on the heavy camera and a bag with a couple of additional lenses, I hardly notice the additional weight of the CF tripod. That doesn’t mean it isn’t still bulky and inconvenient, but with a shoulder strap it’s quite feasible to walk some distance with it. This trip will include some hiking, so we’ll see how far I can go before the tripod gets jettisoned. I was really pleased with the results from my last field outing with the tripod, so I plan to carry it as much as I can stand.

The guy in seat 39F has a brand-new Nikon D70 digital SLR out and is playing with it as he studies the quick-start guide and owner’s manual. He’s obviously having a blast. There’s nothing like having a complex new toy to master.

I actually have a new camera with me, too. A tiny little Canon S500 digital Elph, the latest 5-megapixel compact. It replaces an S110, an older 2-megapixel model in the same form factor. The S500 does have a few features the S110 didn’t, but the controls and menus are still quite similar. I haven’t finished going through the owner’s manual yet, but everything is so familiar I don’t really need to. Besides, for me the S500 is going to serve as the casual back-up camera, not the main camera, so I probably won’t be trying to do anything very fancy with it.

No, the new toy factor for this trip will be the Z4. The car has been on order for over a month, so I’ve had plenty of time to study the online owner’s manual and haunt the Internet forums devoted to it. Thanks (?) to the forums I am aware of dozens of things that can go wrong with the Z4. With any luck, none of them will apply to mine.

Another first for this trip: I am equipped for 1xRTT data services via my cellphone. Coverage permitting, this will enable me to stay in touch with the Net without wasting every evening screwing around with hotel phone systems and local dialup numbers. With all the email systems I supervise for AMSAT, I can’t afford to be away from the net for more than a day or so at a time, or the backlog will become overwhelming. So, I signed up for the unlimited data plan. Besides email, I should be able to post updates like this one throughout the trip. That’s easy when I have hours to kill in the airplane. We’ll see what happens when I’m on the road. Until then.

I’ve arrived at Greenville/Spartanburg.

One Z4-trunk worth of baggage.

Airport shuttle, powered by BMW.

Pat Witt, Wayne Doyle, and I rode our motorcycles to the Laughlin River Run motorcycle rally this weekend. We stayed Friday night at the Harrah’s casino hotel in Laughlin. Didn’t even need a reservation at Harrah’s. I guess the bikers don’t like to pay $180 for a hotel room at the far end of the strip.

Wowie. There were many whole boatloads of motorcycles there. Almost all Harleys. Many with obscenely loud exhaust systems (”pipes”). Many with spectacular custom paint jobs, or even custom frames and odd shapes. Even the regular open parking lots were like custom motorcycle shows.

The vendor area was entertaining for a few hours. Lots of t-shirts, leather accessories (all kinds), and other stuff with even more tenuous connections to motorcycling, in addition to the obvious motorcycles and related stuff. Pat bought a new non-leather motorcycle jacket to replace his heavy black leather one. Wayne bought a rally t-shirt. I bought a diet coke.

They had some biker gang violence at this event last year (or was it two years ago?) so this year the police were very much in evidence, and all the hotels were enforcing a “no colors” policy: nobody was allowed to wear a jacket with any type of writing on it. Even a non-leather jacket with just the manufacturer’s brand name logo on it (like mine) was out of bounds. I suppose the hotels believe that the gangs are too stupid to kill each other if the combatants aren’t clearly labeled. Be that as it may, I didn’t hear of any violence this year. The cops seemed mostly idle, except for ticketing the more outrageously moronic displays of drunk driving (riding) among those cruising loudly up and down the strip.

Pat was having some trouble with his bike, which is an old 1979 Harley. We had to push-start it a couple of times (which it turns out is easier than it sounds). Pat decided it was the battery, so after leaving Laughlin we stopped at a motorcycle shop Pat had spotted in Needles and bought a new battery. That’s a bigger deal than it sounds like, because the battery ships uncharged and with the battery acid packed separately. To make the battery ready for service, you have to add the acid and then charge it for an hour or so. Then of course you have to get it into the bike. And if you’re a cheapskate like Pat, you do the last part yourself with semi-appropriate tools borrowed from the standard Honda toolkit on Wayne’s bike. Among other limitations, the Honda tools are of course all metric, while the Harley is all prehistoric. So we ended up cooling our heels in Needles (right on historic Route 66, next to the BNSF railroad tracks) for about an hour and a half.

The bike started right up with the new battery. By the next stop, it was flat again. Oops. My theory (that it was probably a problem with the alternator or charging circuits) was apparently correct. So we push-started it again and rode on. No problem. Except that with the extra delay in Needles, we were going to run out of daylight while still in the mountains around Anza. And … the headlights, tail lights, turn signals, etc. on a motorcycle run off the battery, not off the motor. So as it got dark, we noticed that Pat’s bike had no lights. Not good.

I proposed the safe (and legal) solution was to park the busted bike in Anza and come back for it in the daylight. This proposal was not accepted. Instead, Wayne and I rode escort in formation around Pat’s dark bike all the way back to Pat’s driveway. It went safely, without incident or near-incident, but it was still without a doubt the stupidest thing I’ve done on a motorcycle so far. Like most stupid stunts, we got away with it, this time.

Total miles: 690, including the detour to Pat’s house at the end.

See a few photos from the trip.