...evidently caused by a broken-down truck that had to be towed out, likely
due to some sort of accident but it was hard to tell by then.
Tow trucks that tow trucks are pretty awesome. |
Any period of stop-n-crawl slow traffic can be a big boost for MPG in a Prius, so I just don't worry about them anymore and spend them playing the "speed averaging" game which tends to smooth the flow around me anyway. Soon enough we were back up to normal speed, and a while later I got off the NY thruway onto the secondary roads and soon caught sight of the first big Catskills ridge I'd have to climb over. |
The climb put a bit of a dent in the running MPG average ... |
... but I got most of it back on the downside. It's entertaining how one can sort of track the terrain through the 5-minute MPG graph bars. |
The main drag through town, looking south, which didn't take very long to traverse. |
I went and checked in at the campground,
just to make sure I could find it
and really had a spot and to get the finances settled up before the staff went
home for the night. That was fairly easy. But now came the larger problem.
Other than the campground I had no idea where to go or what other GGP
participants might be in town or who I was supposed to go find. So I didn't
have much choice other than to tool around looking for features of the area
and/or evidence of more people in for the event.
What I really needed as my weekend getaway guide was this:
The "uphill" labels are serious -- the lake is in a narrow valley, and the land all around it is several hundred feet above lake level in altitude. So as soon as you begin going away from the lake, you climb. Knowing a little about this also helps when trying to anticipate some of the terrain found on the rally route.
|
As I headed back down into town, I spotted this little fella parked on the street. Aha, I thought, this has to be one of the GGP people. But I had no idea where the owner might actually be. |
I headed back to the elementary school lot, and encountered another arrival unloading his wood-fired Trooper. |
Since no other evidence of event participants was forthcoming, I continued my exploration by heading up [and I do mean *UP*] to said state park a little later just to see it. This is one of the main entrances to the Glen, it turns out, with the actual campground off to the side. The building is about where the circled "419" is above the little loops of road on the map, and behind it are steep trails leading down into the Glen. The lady at the park gate was very nice when I said I was already camping at Clute and just wanted to see this place and come out again and told me to go ahead in without dinging me for any fees. Well, there's no question about where to stay for future events -- the state park is *so* much nicer than the rather crowded, redneck-y feeling of the RV park down in the valley. Nothing really against Clute per se, whose facilities are perfectly adequate, it just didn't have the kind of space and woodsy-ness of this. |
In the morning, there were cute little rabbits everywhere. |
That morning, the rally happened. I was too busy trying to figure out what
was going on, and then driving, and didn't get any pictures. But there are
some pictures at the
Green Grand Prix site,
some of which are
buried inside PDFs.
I was assigned a navigator from a pool of people around to help out, who turned out to be a native of the area while growing up and thus knew many of the roads. But even with her memory, my GPS, and both of us trying to figure out the instructions, we got lost and in one case a particularly time-destroying way by thinking we needed to stop for 15 minutes in some random graveyard. We and several other cars probably took the wrong county road [out of a choice of dozens] due to unclear direction, and we passed a few other entrants who were milling around trying to sort themselves out too. But another major kicker was the typical rally "average speed" directive, which often runs largely at odds with fuel-efficient driving. Sorry, you put me at the bottom of a steep hill and say "commence average speed 50 MPH", that's NOT going to happen instantaneously when I'm at the helm. And some of these secondary and tertiary roads really do have posted speed limits of 55, which are flat-out ridiculous especially for anyone unfamiliar with the area, and the rally course designers simply followed many of these blindly without understanding a> why it was a hazard, and b> why trying to drive the route as they expected was likely to return about the poorest possible MPG for a given vehicle. So we came in with nearly the lowest rally score [greatest number of "points", but the highest MPG in the Prius class by a healthy margin. We likely could have done much better on the timing without getting lost, so this is NOT any sort of indictment of ecodriving style. I'm not a frequent rally driver in the classic sense, and wasn't really expecting anything besides a reasonably pleasant 80-ish mile tour around the lake. Which we did have. The directions back down the east side were a bit more clear, and closer to the end several of the participants wound up traveling near each other in sort of a pack. The SCCA is apparently all about the traditional speed, distance, and timing, and apparently refuse to understand or acknowledge anything to do with high-MPG driving style which to a large degree lets the terrain be one's master rather than time. It is even more telling that the entry with the highest MPG, the little Moonbeam I'd spotted in town the day before, landed at the bottom of the score chart despite turning in an honest 100 MPG on his run. Well, sorry, to me that does not make a "green" event even if alternative fuels are involved. I have similarly mixed feelings about autocrosses held at alternative-vehicle and energy events. |
Anyway, with the rally out of the way, we all retired to the elementary school parking lot to display our stuff. I set up my usual tech-doc in the windows and table full of flyers. This was also the first time out for the new pop-up canopy since the modifications. |
Over at one side of the parking lot, a trailer-based band stage was being set up. At this point a few dark, threatening clouds began rolling in over the hills. |
It did indeed spit a little rain and the wind kicked up, causing the band sound guys to scramble to secure the tent and keep things dry. |
That final excursion of the day brought me closer to empty on fuel, so I went
to fill up for tomorrow's trip home before heading to the campground. As I
got back into town and pulled into a Sunoco, a little tiny voice in the back
of my head was trying to tell me that this wasn't a good idea.
I should have listened. Their goddamn pump nozzle wasn't functioning quite right, and it seemed that while the car was fairly thirsty by now, it seemed to be taking MUCH more gas than usual given where the gauge had been. I stopped it and went to pull the nozzle out, and almost got my first ever "Prius burp". Evidently I had stretched the bladder a little, because the fuel tried to rise and gurgle its way back out the fill hole. I quickly stuffed the nozzle back in to help seal the hole [which has a rubber gasket to minimize vapor leakage around the fuel nozzle], and carefully shook the car down to try and settle the level and eject any trapped air. Pulled the nozzle again and iterated this a couple more times and finally got things to the point where the level was still visible, but stable. With some degree of relief mixed with trepidation I replaced the cap without any real spillage. | |
Okay, so now the tank was *very* full, and I was concerned what might happen
as the gas warmed up and expanded, particularly the next morning. I took a
half-hour tool around more of the surrounding countryside to run off some of
the excess, and finally headed back toward Clute to sleep. But it was dark by
now, and I couldn't see much around me ... and ran into the additional hangup
of a DUI checkpoint coming back into town on 14. That's not necessarily a bad
thing, it just took a little while to work through the line of cars.
As a general warning, there's something about Sunoco or at least my experiences with it that's just deeply wrong on several levels -- fuel quality, personnel, equipment, whatever. This wasn't just an isolated experience; there have been others. |
In the morning I headed out, taking another leisurely run along some very canonical rural roads over hill and dale. Yet more gorgeous countryside. |