I’m about 400 miles from home tonight. I decided to splurge and stay in the mansion at Col Alto, which is now part of a Hampton Inn – but what a place:

The car has 15,850 miles on it.

Tonight I’m in Asheville, NC. I was up on the Blue Ridge Parkway today, but it got pretty chilly (there was ice on the rocks at the side of the road). I’ll probably take the Interstate back home and come back in the spring to finish up my Parkway drive. Here’s a picture of the Atom on the Parkway:

Here’s another good reason to always wear your helmet – up on the Parkway, I heard a “plonk” on the right side of my helmet. After I stopped, I found this critter stuck in the Atom’s intake snorkel:

Tonight I’m in Olive Branch, MS. I’m avoiding Tennessee due to the boycott arranged by Tail of the Dragon, so I’ll be moving through Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia before heading up through North Carolina. Not much else to report.

Today I drove the Atom up to Eureka Springs, AR. I visited the Eureka Springs & North Arkansas Railway, a 2-mile scenic train route. They used to operate steam equipment, but the federal boiler inspectors have become a lot tougher due to an incident elsewhere, so they can only operate diesel equipment now. [I used to work on steam equipment in the summer when I was in High School, so I’m familiar with the enormous time and expense to keep it running.]

This is one of their steam locomotives, and is probably the closest to operable of all of them:

This is the diesel they use to pull the passenger car(s). While this is a very small operation, the engineer has an incredibly good hand with the throttle – the coupling and uncoupling was done perfectly:

Afterwards, I drove the Atom down the Pig Trail, which has some nice twists and turns. It turns out I just missed Willie Nelson in Eureka Springs – he was in a bus in the parking lot of City Hall when I stopped in and asked for directions.

I’m taking some time in northwest Arkansas, as the weather to the east has been miserable this week and won’t be clearing up until Saturday or so.

Today I stopped at War Eagle Caverns. On the way there, my GPS steered me onto a dirt road (what is it with GPS, my Atom, and dirt roads?). I did get a nice shot of the Atom on a bridge:

Don’t let the nice concrete bridge fool you – this is a poor dirt road. For the adventurous, it is Fate Anderson Rd (526).

Once I got back onto a real road, I headed to War Eagle Caverns. I was in a nice small tour group with 3 other people.

Some pillars (these are only about a foot and half high) near the entrance:

The bats are starting to move into the cave and go to sleep for the winter. This is a male juvenile bat:

High iron concentrations in this part of the cave stain the formations a reddish-brown:

An underground waterfall:

I’m back in Springdale, AR now. The car has 14,500 miles on it at this point.

Thursday morning started with driver instruction, first in the classroom and then follow-the-leader on the track until we all got comfortable with the layout and lines of the track. Here’s a few of the Atoms lining up for tech inspection before heading out to the track:

After that, we alternated in two groups on the track. After a break for lunch, it was “take a Brit to the track”, since the UK Atom owners weren’t able to bring their cars to AtomFest.

I let Joe (the resident track expert) drive my Atom on the track to give a UK owner a better track experience than I could deliver. Unfortunately, a short way into a lap (turn 4, for those keeping track), a coolant hose popped off the coolant tube on my Atom, leaving behind a cloud of coolant which turned the track into a slick surface, causing the next 4 or 5 cars to do some interesting spins. Here’s my Atom venting coolant:

This had my Atom in the service bay until late Friday morning. Unfortunately, while the shop was able to get the coolant line repaired and the engine checked out, my instrument cluster started acting up again. This meant that I wasn’t able to get an accurate reading for engine temperature (it read 61 degrees below zero). With that, I wasn’t comfortable pushing the car hard on the track, since I wouldn’t know if the alarms I was getting from the dash were real or a hallucination from the dash. I did a few [relatively] easy laps on the track, but spent most of the time taking pictures.

This is Eddie Hill’s Atom:

This is CalScot’s amazing 400HP Atom. It sounds completely different from the standard Atom:

Some intense video action:

Competition heats up:

Tight in the turn:

I’m leaving today for AtomFest, the first large-scale gathering of Atoms in the US. As usual, I’ll be posting from my various stops along the way, as well as from AtomFest.