Rufus - Life with the 2017 Flyin' Miata Turbo RF

Super jealous y’all get to drive that back to Texas! Y’all be safe, and I can first hand say Seth’s cookies are awesome! 

In rough order of the day: 

Picked up by Kyle. Kyle is super nice. 

Met Keith, showed us the shop, all the stuff, Rufus, the car, took me for a ride in the V8 ND (I want one) took Rufus for a quick spin, excellent. 35th anniversary lunch for Flyin' Miata with great Mexican food and ice cream cake. Chatted with Keith and Bill, signed papers with Teri because she's clearly the grown up and then decided to just get a room in Grand Junction because there's only a couple hours of daylight left and we don't want to miss the scenery in this corner of the world by driving in the dark. We'll take off early tomorrow and see what we can see. 

The car is this good:

Will you be back next year to buy the v8 ND? :) 

Keith, 

Care to explain the teddy bear on the Catfish? 

Fleet looks a lot thinner but there is still the same car on the rack almost 2 years later :)

The Opel on the rack has a fun story which Keith might tell. The rack is probably a good place for it to be. Looks pretty there. 

There was a bunch of fun stuff. 

bmw88rider said:

Care to explain the teddy bear on the Catfish?

There's a question you don't hear everyday.

APEowner said:

bmw88rider said:

Care to explain the teddy bear on the Catfish?

There's a question you don't hear everyday.

If he’d left the word “bear” out it would have changed the meaning slightly. 

Pete Gossett said:

APEowner said:

bmw88rider said:

Care to explain the teddy bear on the Catfish?

There's a question you don't hear everyday.

If he’d left the word “bear” out it would have changed the meaning slightly. 

That's an image I could have done without.

Ha! So, the bear was being used for reverse camera product shots because none of my coworkers wanted to lie down behind the car. And then I just never put it away...

Seth and Deucekid are pretty cool people. I got dragged away for work stuff but we had a good bit of time to chat. If I didn't have to make a run to Denver tonight I would have enjoyed dinner with them. As it was, Vail pass was closed for a while and the traction law was in effect for most of the trip. Going over the mountains in Rufus would have been an adventure too far for sure.

The fleet isn't much smaller than it was when you were here, bmw88rider. Some of it's just been redistributed - Elvis is at Matt's house, the Targa and my smurf are at my house, and we made Bill take many of his BMWs home. But not all. The biggest difference is that there are very few customer cars in attendance. We delivered one while Seth was here - another turbo RF, of all things - and our inventory has taken over a big part of the building. You can see the pallets of exhausts piled up in the background in the Rufus picture. 23,000 square feet looked awfully big a decade or so ago.

As for the Opel GT - the boss has a baby poop colored GT that he plans to put a Miata drivetrain in. That's not going to be an easy fit. The red car is one that had a tree fall on it, leading to a roofectomy via Sawzall. Then mice moved in and it got all rusty. It's a hazmat situation that's basically destined to be the "how do I make it fit" chassis for the baby poop car before it is thrown away. Bill got as far as taking it apart, then we put it on top of the shelves to get it out of the way. Hmm, it could be a Challenge car...

We had dinner with Bill and Teri last night. What wonderful people. Flyin' Miata doesn't just make neat stuff, they're a neat company with an interesting history. One thing I learned talking to people while at their lunch and while walking around is that a large number of their workers have been there for an absurdly long time. And they're happy. They were right in the middle of packing and shipping all of the Black Friday orders and were beyond swamped and they were all still happy. It was great. 

We also got talking motorcycles and MotoGP and it's likely we could have talked for several more hours, but time zones were not in kid#4's favor and he was falling asleep in the booth at the restaurant. Grand Junction is out of the way and it's hard to say when I might be back, but I'm going to try and find and excuse. 

The alarm is about to go off. The route is in the GPS on my phone (we will be doing the upgrade when I get home to use Google maps through the screen in the car) and we just need to grab breakfast and go. I'm looking forward to the day.

Good morning, you two headed to Durango and then on to Albuquerque ? 

Love that windshield time, be safe and keep us posted please.

Cars are meant to be driven. Threads like this keep me motivated to get mine up and going enough to where i don't need to sweet if im going to make it to my destination. Safe travels

It’s true, we have a lot of long-term employees. Over a quarter of us have a decade or more in place. Might be a higher percentage than that. At least three of us are awfully close to the two decade mark or have already passed it. It’s a good bunch of people.

I hope kid 4 got his quality Cartoon Network time! I’m looking forward to the pictures from today. 

Def looking forward to the pictures. Having had 9 Miatas (all generations except ND), I wish I chose a different career path, and worked at a place like FM :( Almost 22 years Miata.net member

Miata stuff. 

It was 26 degrees and things were good here. We went up. It got down to 12 degrees with about 8 inches of snow. I did not stop to take pictures. Life is interesting when the car starts wiggling at 13mph so you slow down to 11. 

deucekid#4 might not have seen ice like deucekid#2 did... but he might end up seeing more of mazdeuce's pupils in daylight than any of the deucekids

Surprised you went that way. Hope all ends up ok. 

That looks like Utah red rocks, which means it’s probably 128 or 191. That is the easy option today!

mazdeuce - Seth said:

Miata stuff. 

It was 26 degrees and things were good here. We went up. It got down to 12 degrees with about 8 inches of snow. I did not stop to take pictures. Life is interesting when the car starts wiggling at 13mph so you slow down to 11. 

Quoted, just to bump this awesome pic to the next page. Safe travels.

Let me start by pointing out that I'm not a great navigator. I'm also not a great driver or mechanic which limits my usefulness, but for today it's the navigator part that's relevant. I woke up this morning at 3:45 and my brain wouldn't let me go back to sleep because I hadn't put  a route in the GPS. I knew I didn't want to take 191 because everyone told me it was lame. For some reason that escapes me now but made sense at 3:45, I chose 141 instead of 128. The locals can probably point out exaclty what magnitude that mistake was.

We did survive and it was one hell of a road all things considered. After making it out if the bad stuff there was still quite a lot of snow.  We got down to lower elevations but it wasn't until well after noon that we were on roads that were merely wet. Dry roads weren't to be seen until after 2:00.

We had fun. Stopped and looked at stuff. Played on the rocks which are always a novelty if you grow up within spitting distance of the gulf coast. 

We've got miles to make tomorrow, that's for sure. Car is great and I'm looking forward to about another 13 hours behind the wheel. 

141! You’re nuts. That’s got some altitude. Adventure for sure. 

This was us walking to the car at 4:30. I'll be honest, it's a little hairy out there. It looks like about 20 more miles until the roads go from icy death to just wet. We're holed up until it gets ligh. ND lights aren't warm enough to keep themselves free of ice. 

Where did you end up spending the night? I mean, other than the Days Inn :)

Albuquerque.  Should have pressed on to Santa Rosa. Always easy to figure those things in retrospect. 

Edit: and to the forum member who offered food and shelter in ABQ, I'm hoping I don't have to call you.