Day 8: New Orleans, LA to Houston, TX

New Orleans by day and New Orleans by night are so different they are, well, night and day. The older one gets the more enjoyable the days are over the nights., at least for me There is always something going on but we really struck gold as the New Orleans French Quarter Festival started on Friday. Music and food all over the place.

From 2007 USA Elises

From 2007 USA Elises

Here is a little video of a jazz band playing.

We milled around there for a couple of hours, eating different dishes and listening to some great live music. One thing is for sure: the cities following New Orleans are going to have to do pretty well to match that. I actually experienced the first bit of sadness leaving New Orleans as we were leaving when a great event was starting. Also I had been there less than a year ago for the wedding of some good friends of mine and a wave of nostalgia for that great time swept over me.

But...nothing gets you over the last like the next, and we headed onto Houston. The drive there was made to feel longer than it actually was due to another thunderstorm but more so by the awful road between the two cities (I10). Not much happened during the drive. After entering Texas I was expecting to see more adventurous food, but was still a little aghast to see a big sign advertising a "Human Buffet". After some scrutiny I realised the M was just a really poorly crafted N.

Regarding the itinerary, we have decided to not go to Dallas. We played with the idea of taking the long trek through south Texas to El Paso, but after gathering a number of opinions we will do one day in San Antonio, then take the hill roads to Austin, and then go north west through Texas, staying in somewhere like Abilene or Lubbock, and then onto Santa Fe.

Some people have been asking where the in-car footage is. I have taken quite a bit of it, but the compact flash reader I bought in Panama City has stopped working already, so it is all stuck on the card still. I am not taking any more for fear of overwriting the earlier clips. As soon as I get a new way of retrieving the clips I will put some up.

From a technological struggle to a triumph: I have started using my phone to record little voice memos to myself when on the road as reminders when writing the blog. They are extremely handy, especially given my awful memory. Since learning this Jared suggested I do one day's blog as a podcast. It's an interesting thought, and if I can stay eloquent and interesting for sufficient time I may do one. Every voice memo I have recorded so far starts with "also..." which is really starting to annoy me, so I would have to fix that first :)

Day 7: Panama City, FL to New Orleans, LA

..and then there were two.

Hot news of the day: Cory has left to go house hunting with his wife in Ohio. We wish him all the best with it, and understand that the timing has been bad for this trip with him and the whole house situation.

This has left myself and Jared to fly the Lotus flag for the rest of the tour. We had a sit down and thought about the trip, and decided it was a good juncture to see how we could improve things. We decided that we are doing too much city-to-city driving without enough local culture, so from now on we are selecting some things to visit between destinations.

Putting this plan into action, we decided to take the coastal road from Panama City to Pensacola. It seemed like the area was being aggressively built up and was a hot new area, but later when speaking to a couple in New Orleans I learned that it sustained considerable hurricane damage and is being rebuilt, although I think the truth is a combination of the two.

On the outskirts of Panama City we visited a diving museum. That sounds boring but it was a great little place. Outside the building was an array of small submarines.

Inside we were greeted by a man called Doug. If one was asked to imagine the archetypal nautical enthusiast then he would be the result; sailor's cap and white beard. Brilliant. UK readers would have immediately thought of Uncle Albert, although the beard could have been bushier.

Without any ceremony or introduction he launched into his lecture, declaring "The air on land is so-and-so inches of mercury and for every 100 feet one descends in water the pressure..." and continued for a few minutes on this theme. Upon finishing we introduced ourselves and he then then took us through the museum, playing DVDs and explaining the items. He was a really nice fellow and the museum was precisely the kind of diamond we were hoping to discover in the rough off the major roads.

After traversing eight states in the first two days we had been in Florida for five, and it was a little refreshing to hit new state borders: Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

One charming thing about the south is how people introduce themselves. We met a family at a petrol stop and the wife came over, shook my hand and said something like "Hi I am Lou-Anne Henderson from Mobile, Alabama". More information than I am used to in an introduction but I appreciate the openness. In hindsight my response of "hello" appears to be a little insufficient but never mind.

A more confusing question we experienced was 'what's on the dash?'. My answer of 'not too much, a little dust and a parking stub from yesterday' was met with a bemused look. I then found out the man was trying to determine what the largest number on the speedometer was.

We arrived in New Orleans and met up with my friend John and his friend Larry, had a nice fish dinner and patrolled the French Quarter for a while, catching some good live music and having a laugh.


I finally got the ChaseCam going today. It's a fabulous product but thankfully I did some tests clips and realised I do far too much 'steering-wheel guitar' and moved the camera location from the back window to in front of the rear view mirror. I took a fair amount of footage and will get some clips online once I decide the best place for them. I think Picasa can host video.

Day 6: Tampa FL to Panama City FL

We had a rest evening yesterday, and as a result didn't see any of Tampa. Hopefully next time I am here I can experience the city. However we did stay in the kind of motel that, as an Englishman, is associated with movies where bloody and gruesome things normally occur. The movie Memento popped into my head. "Lenny!"

The original plan for today was to make it to Pensacola, but we changed this to Panama City. This helped as it equated today's and tomorrow's journey times as Panama City was an hour and a half closer to Tampa. We left in much better weather than yesterday:

From 2007 USA Elises

A few Lotus related things happened today: first off we drove under a bridge that was called "Jim Clark Road". I didn't have time to grab a picture of it unfortunately. At the next petrol stop we met a family whose father told us his mother was from Norfolk. He was quite pleased when we informed him that the cars he had just been cooing over were from there too. He did however come out with one of those classic lines for people with English ancestors: "my grandmother shot at V2 bombs in the war". It's like anyone with a long lineage in the US had family on the Mayflower; that ship must have been a massive cruise liner. Or anyone in Liverpool in the 50s used to go to see The Beatles at The Cavern, which of course held 100,000 people.

There were a couple of mileage milestones: I hit 2000 miles for the whole journey so far, and my Elise clicked over to 25000 miles since I got her in April 2005:

From 2007 USA Elises

We had to shop around for a hotel as down by the main waterfront it was full of college kids doing what they do, and we didn't want to leave the cars in areas where they would be up to mischief at night. It seems that Spring Break hasn't yet finished. That area of town was full of youngsters revving beaten up Camaros and Civics with body kits so we headed out a little. We ended up at a quieter area with rooms overlooking the cars so it all turned out ok. Dinner was (yet another) steak.


I realised that we have yet to see another Elise (or any Lotus) so far on the trip. Tomorrow we hit New Orleans; I know there are a couple of EliseTalk people who live there so maybe tomorrow we will have more luck.

See the gallery for more pics, and as usual today's GPS route can be seen at automapic.com.

Automapic.com updates

As we are having a quiet night in I am doing some updates to the site, based on feedback and my own to do list. These are the current things to do. (Be warned that this may be a little geeky)

• Fix zoom level and scroll position when selecting a leg. When a leg is selected the zoom level is currently too high so I will scale that back. Also the map is centered incorrectly at the first Point of Interest, rather than the start of the leg. (I published this fix a little while ago.)
• Fix the XML Atom news feed. Although the feed contains a fair bit of information, the structure isn't correct and nothing other than the title is showing up in the news readers I have tried (Google Reader and Bloglines).
• Fix the Calendar export. The ICAL export button downloads the journey itinerary in iCalendar format so that it can be imported into a calendar application. This currently works fine for iCal on the Mac and Google Calendar (the only ones I have tried). However Outlook users are reporting that it complains that the calendar scale is not a Gregorian one. Even though I am setting it to Gregorian something isn't working with Outlook. Not sure how easily I can fix this as I don't have Outlook but it's on the list.
• Google Earth export. The Google Earth export buttons have been there for a while, but are simply teasing as I have yet to hook this up.
• Nicer itinerary view. Although the current itinerary shows a nice view of the locations of the stops and their dates, unless the itinerary is imported to a calendar there is no way to glance at the itinerary as a whole. I want to add in a popup table of the itinerary or overlay it on a calendar within the site.
• Better URL handling for locations. If a URL is set for a new location, it will not work correctly unless beginning with http://
• Safari problems. Safari has been working during my tests, but it locks up when displaying a leg path on Jared's machine. I am certain this is due to me not being clever enough with the Google Map path zoom levels; each point in a path has an associated zoom level at which that point should be displayed. I can probably just set every nth one to show up when zoomed out and scale them from there.
  
• Some additions to the admin section, but those are low priority as they just affect me for now :)
  

Day 5: Miami FL to Tampa FL

A quick sprint today from Miami to Tampa. There was a danger that we would have to go a long way round as there were some big fires apparently along the road we were planning on taking, although by the morning these warnings had disappeared. We left Miami in reasonable weather; a little muggy but not raining, although it was threatening.

From 2007 USA Elises

An hour or so later and the threat level was increased from guarded to high.

From 2007 USA Elises

Then we encountered a storm that would have had Noah scurrying anxiously to his workshop, wood plane in hand.

From 2007 USA Elises

The Elises performed well in this weather even at decent cruising speeds, although I had no idea where we were or what was around us. I saw these supports at one point and inferred that we were on a bridge of some sort.

From 2007 USA Elises

Back to those fires; we saw no real evidence ourselves apart from some roadsigns warning of smoke and occasionally we could smell the remains of a fire. We were also hoping to visit a gator farm but they were apparently not on the route we took.

Tonight we are relaxing in the motel, then tomorrow we are off to Panama City.

Day 4: Miami FL

Today was a rest day. Having said that we still drove for over an hour to the beach and back (the return bit took a while due to traffic and roadworks).

South Beach, Miami is a really cool place; a quality stretch of restaurants and cafes with a very nice beach, and not cheesy or over crowded. There was a rumour that Spring Break was going on this week, but thankfully we saw no evidence of it. We got plenty of attention cruising around. Here is Cory about to race a Miami cop:

From 2007 USA Elises

He won but got arrested and tortured horribly. Never mind. Here is a pic of us heading into South Beach. I love the flared corners at the front of the Elise; they are the only things one can see in front of the windscreen when driving:

From 2007 USA Elises

We had a brunch at the edge of the beach and walked around a bit. Weather was 85 or so with nice humidity and the water was lovely. I did my customary 5 mile swim. Well...I paddled around a bit with the water up to my knees then ran out of the water. One thing we did ponder was that there can't be many people that have undertaken a drive where they have dipped their toes in the Atlantic, The Gulf and The Pacific. Looking forward to completing that hat trick :)

You know you are with Elise-obsessed people when they tell you to meet them at "the lifeguard hut that looks kind of saffron yellow and krypton green with the chrome orange trim"

From 2007 USA Elises

I came across this place. I remember rolling a car here once. I think it was in Grand Theft Auto 3:

From 2007 USA Elises

We cruised back to the hotel after the beach. Plenty of attention and amusing conversations coming back, including:

Boy: "Is that a Lamborghini?"
Jared: "No it's a Fettuccine"

40-something woman leaning into car: "How much does it cost?"
Me: "45 grand or so."
*pause*
"Are you Jewish?"
"No"
"Oh you sound Jewish"
"Ummm..." (light turned green at this point)
I never worked it out...

The guy on his little moped revving enthusiastically next to us at a light made me laugh a lot, and he and his girlfriend were cracking up too. It's the little moments that make the day...

Day 3: Orlando, FL to Miami, FL

First bit of sight seeing: we went to Kennedy Space Center. Here is heading towards it:

From 2007 USA Elises

We had a nice chat with one of the security guards when we parked, as a big crowd of people descended on the trio of Elises. Given the amount we had to pay to get into the Space Center we could have subsidised that with charging for rides in the cars.

Having said that Kennedy Space Center is an amazing place; awe inspiring, immense and very humbling. Truly the pinnacle of human achievement in my opinion.

From 2007 USA Elises

I had a nice time meeting a family from Ireland. I got my fix of talking football :) Meeting them triggered memories of our family trip to Florida in 1983 (I think), although their kids were a lot more well behaved than we were (again, I think!).

From 2007 USA Elises

After the space center we moved on down to Miami. The traffic behaviour changed again about half way down. In northern Florida people are just fast drivers. Further south they are not only fast but pretty awful, and quite aggressive. We think one guy in his Acura blew his engine trying to weave and race around us. We had one police car pulling up beside us at a light, but she just wanted to hear about our travels and what club we belonged to.

The hotel is nice and relaxing:

From 2007 USA Elises

I am currently having a bloody mary outside a cafe in South Beach, Miami, but more about today tomorrow :)