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. 

The Atom and I are back at home. We’ve actually been here since Wednesday, but I’ve been taking time to clean up the car in preparation for a photo shoot this weekend. Right now the car has 12,113 miles on it. I think I’m still the US Atom mileage record-holder.

Party time! Excellent!

I’m in Aurora, Illinois (home of Wayne’s World) tonight. Tomorrow I’ll spend the day at Aurora Bearing talking about Atom suspension components. Tonight I stopped at the Roundhouse for dinner and it was most excellent. Highly recommended if you’re in the area. The odometer says 11,128 miles.

Not much to report today. It was quite chilly and overcast when I started out, and didn’t get any warmer. The highest temperature I saw along the way was 56 degrees. Of course, moving at 70MPH in an Atom, there’s wind chill to consider. I stopped at a discount store and purchased a second heavy jacket which I put over my original jacket, and that helped a bit. 10,709 miles so far.

Not much to report – a relatively long drive today en route to the Chicago area. 10,407 miles.

Today started off quite chilly in Cody, Wyoming at 43 degrees at 10:30 AM. It was also quite overcast, so I didn’t get any heat benefit from the darker colors on the Atom. My route took me up Highway 14A into the Bighorn National Forest, at elevations approaching 10,000 feet. Click here for a map. At those elevations, my breath was condensing and freezing on the inside of my helmet visor. 14A doesn’t really use a pass through the mountains – it just climbs to the top via switchbacks, runs along the top for some time, and then descends via switchbacks (you can explore the link above to see what’s down the road if you want). There were a number of great photographic opportunities, but I was concentrating on getting down off the mountain before I froze.

Tonight I’m in Gillette, WY which is about 60 miles from the South Dakota state line, near Devil’s Tower National Monument. I passed 10,000 miles today – the current reading is 10,048.

I’m in Cody, Wyoming tonight. Tomorrow I start the long (1300 mile or so) run to Chicago. There probably won’t be many pictures along the way (I’m taking I-90, despite my pre-trip plan to take I-94 – I expect this will be a bit warmer). Right now the car has about 9800 miles on the odometer.

Today was another day of driving around Yellowstone. This time it was taking the north loop. Lots of pictures.

One of Yellowstone’s many waterfalls:

Bacteria growing in a thermal spring. The different colors represent colonies living at different temperatures:

Constant Geyser. So named not because it goes off continuously, but because it is one of the few non-periodic ones with frequent eruptions:

Black Growler, a steam vent:

The Dragon’s Mouth, a vent that is receding into the hillside, forming a deepening cave:

A bison with places to go and things to do (so he’s taking the highway):

Yellowstone Lake:

And my Atom, in case you’ve forgotten what it looks like: