Clubman’s first service

It’s been more than a year now since I bought my Clubman, and it’s been wanting an oil change for a while – much less than 5,000 miles, but due to time:

There’s also a not very urgent recall; so this afternoon I took it to Orlando MINI; Anthony had arranged a loaner for me – another Clubman, though rather different colors (and an automatic transmission):

It’s a creamy white color, which is ok – but it appears to have purple leather seats! Surely a mistaken order (no idea what the color is officially called, don’t really care because I’d never order it).

The center display is smaller than I’m used to, without navigation, and the head up display is missing, but with an iPhone cable I had no problem playing my music on the way home …

 

I was convinced, driving home, that it must be a Cooper because it seemed to be way down on performance compared to my car – but it is an S, so maybe the automatic transmission has a big effect (perhaps it would be better in sport mode, which I didn’t use).

I took pictures of a few showroom MINIs while I was at the dealership, including this strangely wrapped-with-matte (old model) Countryman, and a nice looking (new model) Convertible:

 

It’s nice to have a loaner available, not something I ever had at MINI Peabody!

Penumbral eclipse moon

There’s a “sort of eclipse” of the moon tonight – Phil Plait’s article describes it well: … the Moon misses the umbra, but only by a tiny bit. That’s why this is called a deep penumbral eclipse; it passes deeply into the secondary shadow of the Earth, but not the really dark one … what will you see … the northern part of the Moon will look darker than the southern side, but neither will be dark dark. More dusky, probably. It should certainly be noticeable …

And here’s what I can see right now … I took two pictures, the first at 7:15pm and the second at 7:45pm, to show how the eclipse is getting stronger (you can also see how the shadow appears to rotate around the moon, because of our location on the Earth):

First drive with MINIs of Kissimmee

We learned today of a MINI drive nearby, so I washed my car and we headed down to Championsgate to meet everyone – and there was a good turnout of 15+ MINIs there!

 

I took a photo of each MINI individually, just like the old days!

 

Once everyone had arrived, we set off on a maybe 20 minute drive, over to food trucks in Kissimmee – complete with reserved parking for our group!

 

Good fun to join some MINIs again! Thanks to Joey for organizing 🙂