Un-invited to MINI of Peabody!

Posted on by Ian C.

MINI of Peabody announced a “tech night” for next week, and I of course said I’d like to attend – it’s always fun to spent time at MINI dealerships 🙂
But just now, I received this email back from them:
Thank you for your interest in MINI of Peabody’s Tech Night. Due to a high demand immediately following the launch of our email, we are over capacity for this event. We want to extend you an invite to a second Tech Night that we are planning in the upcoming weeks. We will email you as soon as we have our next date

Don’t they love me any more?
😉

GBMINI#6 … first peek

Posted on by Ian C.

As I wrote yesterday, the R56 simply isn’t my kind of MINI … but having owned GBMINI#5 for less than two months, and due to some other unrelated reasons, I felt that replacing it had to be a zero-cost option – a “straight swap”!

My original plan with the R56 was to evaluate what features I did and did not like, in preparation to trade it in next year for a perfectly spec’ed ’09 Convertible – a Convertible would be a nice alternate drive to GPMINI, and I felt that the R56+ features were worth waiting for.
But, it turned out, the R56 was not worth (me) waiting for!

So I checked around locally to see what R52 Convertible options might be available … having two local & friendly dealerships helps a lot, and with the help of Kerry & Ian at Herb Chambers MINI of Boston, I have found what I need, a “straight swap” into a low mileage MCS Convertible!

It’s not quite spec’ed as I would if ordering from scratch – no Xenons for example … but then GPMINI doesn’t have Xenons either! Kerry will have the 17″ wheels swapped for 16″, and I’ll probably fit a new toggle switch panel to fill up the missing switches (everyone knows how important that is!); the armrest & cupholder are on their way out, too!

The stereo includes the H/K upgrade which I feel is quite important in a Convertible – there’s very little space available to give over to an aftermarket upgrade (and of course, I know how to install an aftermarket HU with H/K, if I want to!); interestingly the previous owner installed a factory iPod adaptor (and yes I know it’s nothing like as useable as the Alpine in GPMINI, or even the R56 interface – but hopefully it’s faster than the R56 interface!)

It’ll be a few days yet till GBMINI#6 is sorted and ready to pick up … Watch this space, as they say.