Morris, allow me to introduce you to the President of the United States.

Well, today was actually a very eventful day! First things first, Michael Jackson is dead and Farrah Fawcett kicked the bucket... But other than that, Morris almost got a kill on Tranquille when he attacked a man crossing the street, we never even saw him until it was almost too late. After that we went downtown for a while, when we were down there we found a Barak Obama bobble head who now lives on the dash board of our car. After putting the president on the dashboard, we found that the heater now works in the car! This is important because now we can drive Morris in the winter without fear of hypothermia/death. After discussing the whole heater thing, we discovered that it only started working lately, almost is if the president fixed the car! Another epic thing that we managed to pull of was the fact that we drove the car though a break in the curb up in a construction zone in the far end of Westsyde, the curb was less than 2 meters wide, and we managed to move Morris through without an issue at all, we still had lots of room!

On another note, we still have a few things to do to Morris. As we have discussed before, the car is a project thus it is never actually complete, we just improve upon it. We really need to do our rotors because they are what is causing the whole grinding/vibrating problem we are faced with. Also, we have to deal with our ventilation system, we have a giant hornet in it for starters, but, we need to fix the flap behind the dashboard that controls what vents spit out air because they are not working properly. It turns out that the vent at our feet works when we turn on the window defogger, which really doesn't bother me. Also we are going to work on getting the rear wiper working, we have the sprayer working but no wiper, so it is kind of useless. Well, for fear of rambling on, I think it is time to end this post. More pictures will be added to the book of Morris soon (once I find the cord to my iPhone...)

-Mitch

"Morris? It's Tom. I'm here to help you."

I took some time the other day to try and work out a route on my GPS, a TomTom OneXL. I wasn't going to bring it, but it really saved the day in Vancouver last week and now I don't think I can travel without it. Working out the route was fairly annoying on the device, seeing as how Morris has a lot of special needs. It's not just as easy as saying "Go to Mexico" like it would be in almost any other vehicle.

The trickiest part was San Fransisco. We had to do two things here, cross the Golden Gate bridge, and drive down Lombard Street. There was no real way to tell TomTom that, and then once it was done, TomTom liked to auto route back to the I5 and down to San Diego. We cannot take the I5 through California. We figure it's going to be much to dangerous in a car like Morris.

So I just sort of guessed my way back to what I thought would be a good highway and went from there. TomTom says it is going to take us a solid 36.5 hours of driving. That's no traffic, no stops, just continuous driving of Morris. So it's for sure going to take like 2 days to get there. We figure, I think anyway, that we will just drive until we hit California, and if it's not dark, we keep going until it is.

On the plus side, I know where every 7/11 in the United States is. Plus all the major travel centre's with pay showers, and all the Wal-Mart's where we can sleep for free in the car without being bothered.

I honestly think I'll go back to San Fransisco though, maybe next year. I don't really care if it's touristy. I'd love to do the 49-Mile Scenic Drive. I mean just look at this fucking palace. Plus of course, one of my favourite videogames being Rush 2049, I really want to drive some of the streets that inspired the tracks, and see the locations for myself.

This is going to take a loooooooooong time.

-steve

"I think we should drive Morris." (Part II)

On Sunday we took Morris back up to the mountaintop we were at the night previous. I thought it was really amusing to see a little tiny car driving up the side of the hills, on 4x4 roads, right to the top.

There are a lot more pictures of this little excursion in the Book of Morris. Must work on getting myself and Mitch in photos and getting in-progress shots, though. Maybe we need a third person. But I guess we never know when stuff like this happens. On that note, on the way down we decided to drive to Logan Lake and park next to the giant dump truck.

The big earth moving bucket thing next to it was actually the visitor centre. There was a girl inside. Also there was a small water cooler. So we started driving back via Merritt, and took the old highway back into town since Morris does not care for hills. A loud clunk and swerve later the muffler was off again, causing havoc on the highway. Mitch went to get it, but it was too hot to touch. He found a Burger King cup on a side post, which was perfect for grabbing it and taking it back to the car.


I think it looks like a really poor version of the Olympics.

-steve

"I think we should drive Morris." (Part I)

This weekend was full of Morris-driving, and we made sure to take lots of pictures! It was far too long since are last misadventures and hopefully we made up for it this weekend.

On Saturday we hit the road north to Barriere. We chose the destination because of how close it was and how flat the highway was, wanting to see what our fuel economy was now like. On our way we learned that Morris isn't too fond of speeds over 80km/h, and often times only a brisk seventy is what he has to offer. It will certainly take longer than expected to reach Mexico, but when driving Morris it becomes very clear- all that matters is we reach the destination. Morris is old, he's got arthritis. If we push him hard he will never make it, we need to just sit back and be happy to let him reach the end on his own terms.

Arriving in Barriere, we promptly left. However, we found we accomplished a respectable 46mpg! I'd like to see us reach 50, keeping in mind our theoretical best is 62mpg. If you were wondering, that 46mpg puts our current fuel bill for Mexico at about $350 for getting there and back. After leaving, Mitch decided it would be much nicer to drive in the shade on the other side of the river, but how would we get there? Lucky for us there was a ferry, and we caught the final sailing! The operators loved the car.

Returning on Westsyde Rd had other advantages as well, like visiting the Whispering Pines raceway!

We stopped in at Whispering Pines briefly, but it looked like they were finishing up for the day when we arrived. Doubly-unfortunate for us, while leaving a large hornet decided to make a home in our air vents, and now we are petrified at the thought of a nest of bee's inside the car. We have the controls set to inside air, hopefully preventing the bugger from entering the car, but are constantly worried if we turn on the fan it will shoot bee's at us. We returned home, and Saturday ended off climbing mountains in the dark, swearing and telling each other we'd return with a good camera the next day.

Morris silently watches over North Kamloops under cover of nightfall.

-steve