My 2000 Honda Civic VP didn’t come with a cruise control. At least one of the cars I have owned had a cruise control (the old Chevy Lumina). And I love having cruise control in the various rental cars I have had.
I have thought for a long time about getting cruise control installed on my car. I considered buying one and installing it myself. Or possibly having it professionally installed.
I searched around for local places that install cruise controls, but surprisingly, there don’t seem to be many places that do it. I did find one though. I called them and found the cost would be close to $380. Ouch! The brand they install is the Rostra Cruise Control. They also claimed they installed it to look like it was factory installed. I did a search, and the Rostra cruise controls seemed to be good.
I looked into the costs of buying a Rostra cruise control, so I could install it myself. But when I looked at the cost, it wasn’t much more to have it professionally installed. I went back and forth on getting one. My wife and I do a lot of long drives, and we always use my car. I also make a 70+ mile drive every weekend for my karate classes.
I decided to get one figuring I will use it alot. I called and set up an appointment for last Friday morning. I arranged to take the morning off from work.
I brought my car to the shop and was there when they openned at 8am. I killed time while they worked on my car by walking to McDonalds for breakfast, and hitting the local used book store. They were finished at 10:30. I checked out the control, and I didn’t think it looked factory installed. I paid, and headed home. I tried it out on the freeway, and it seemed to work pretty well. I was home for a bit, then had to head to work. I don’t normally take the freeway to work, but decided to go that way so I could try out the cruise control. I also wanted to use my Scangauge II to check my gas milage for the trip. About 5 minutes after setting the cruise control, it disengaged by itself. *scratching head* I reset it, and a minute later it disengaged again. It disengaged about 5 times in the 13 mile drive. I was kind of pissed to have spend close to $400 and gotten this. I called the guy, and he described it as interesting. I didn’t think it was too interesting. The guy said stop back at the shop. I snuck out of work early, and headed for the shop. The guy completely replaced the Rostra stuff. The unit, the controller, and re-soldered everything. He took it out for a testdrive, and said it still disengaged, and thought it might be confilicting with my Scangauage. I emailed Rostra to ask them about this, but they haven’t replied.
I did a couple drives over the weekend, both with and without the Scangauge plugged in. It still disengaged a couple times. It did disengage both with and without the Scangauge plugged in. So I am pretty sure it doesn’t have anything to do with the Scangauge. But at least it wasn’t disengaging every few minutes like it had been. I called the guy back, and he said to bring it back, and he will trying using a different power source.
I am planning on using it this weekend for a trip down to Pennsylvania. It will be nice to have cruise control. We also have a drive to eastern New York in a couple weeks.
I will hopefully get a chance to get into the shop tonight or tomorrow to get the power connections changed.
We love to travel. Not all of our trips are flying place or taking cruises. Often we will drive places. Right now I am in the Pittsburgh area visiting relatives and am going to a wedding this afternoon. But with the rising price of gas, there trips are getting more expensive. I could buy a hybrid car, but the payback would be long. My 2000 Honda Civic is in pretty good condition and gets reasonably good gas milage. Usually about 28-29 mpg.
But I saw a thing on CNN the other day about something called hypermiling. I had never heard of it. These hypermiler’s are getting higher than the epa gas milage ratings. A lot of them drive hybrids like the Prius or the Honda Civic Hybrid. But some of the guys drive regular non-hybrid cars. One of the guys gets 50mpg out of his Honda Accord. I was thinking that if he could get 50mpg out of an Accord, I should be able to get better gas milage out of my Honda Civic.
I tried some of the techniques they talked about in the new article, and on some hypermilng related websites that I found. I avoided using the brake by simply taking my foot off the gas pedal sooner, and leaving a larger buffer between me and the car in front of me. I started accelerating slower treating the foot pedal as if there was an egg under my foot. When I stop at a long light, I will shut off my car. I try to avoid having my car running while I am not moving. I was hoping to see my gas milage rise to 35mpg. I filled my tank and start trying these techniques. After 170 mles I filled up my tank. I was surprised to see that I got over 39mpg!!! That is up from about 28 mpg!!! Wow!
So decided to try the techniques on our drive down to Pittsburgh. It was a 300 mile drive on mostly feeways. I basically took easy with no fast acceleration, and avoided braking where possible and safe. It was extremely hot with the temps in the 80s, maybe even 90s. We started off with the windows down, but later rolled the windows up and turned on the air conditioning. Even with the air conditioning on, I still averaged over 33mpg. I am guessing that if we hadn’t used the air conditioning, we would have gotten maybe 37 mpg? I am still learning this stuff, but I am guessing I will continue to get higher gas milage.
I ordered a device called ScanGuage II. This is a cool little gadget that a lot of hypermilers use. It plugs into the data port under the dash of most cars made after 1996. It will tell me real time what my gas milage is, as well as how much gas is left in my tank, the engine’s rpms, how many miles I can expect to get from the gas I have in my tank, etc. Lots of cool stuff. It was not cheap, but I am certain that it will help me save enough gas to easily pay for itself in less than 6 months.
Added 6/8:
I filled up yesterday morning and drove locally using hypermiling techniques. Then I drove most of the way home on the freeway. The first part of the drive we had the AC off, and the windows rolled down. But as it warmed up, we rolled up the windows, and turned on the AC. I stopped and filled up before we left Pennsylvania and entered New York as we have usually found better gas prices in PA. My gas milage was over 37mpg.
It was a little cooler farther north, so I turned of the AC, and rolled the windows down again. I haven’t filled up yet. But I have almost 200 miles on this tank, and the guage isn’t even down to half yet.
I am really excited to get the ScanGuage so I can see whether driving the windows up and air conditioning on, or having the AC off, and the windows down is more efficient. To see what the optimum speed for my car is. I think I will be able to learn a lot using it.
I found out today that I have been accepted for the New York City Marathon. I entered the lottery for the marathon months ago. My odds of getting into the race were only like 1 in 4. But I got lucky and got in. As soon as I knew I was in, I started looking at rooms. A friend of mine had suggested the Park Savoy in New York City. She said it was only a block away from the finish line, was a no frills hotel at a relatively cheap price. I went to thier website and found the reservations page. I looked up the dates I was interested in and they shows as not available. Ack! Where the heck am I going to stay? But then I remembered that she said they might not be taking reservations for November yet. So I decided to call them. After being on hold for a few minutes a guy came on the phone. He said they had a room with two doubles. It was the last room. I took it. It was $185 a night.
I am guessing that following the lottery a lot of rooms might be freed up as people didn’t get chosen in the lottery and called to cancel their reservations. But then again, a lot of people who were picked in the lottery will be reserving those rooms. Well I got a room.
I still need to figure out how to get to New York City. Do I drive, fly, take a train. I have never been there and have to figure out the best way to get there, and get around. Maybe take a train, and then a cab to the hotel? Once we get to the hotel, I think we will be okay. I will need to talk to some of my friends who go to NYC.
My mother-in-law was scheduled to arrive tonight at 7:51pm. I checked Delta’s website this afternoon, and it showed the flight was still scheduled to be on time. So at 7:15 I headed to the airport, and arrived in plenty of time to meet the flight. The arrival board show the flight as scheduled to arrive at 7:51. The board over the baggage carousel listed the flight. I waited and waited. My mother-in-law never showed. The Delta flight remained on the arrival board until about 8:25, never changing to arrived, cancelled, delayed or anything. Then the listing just disappeared from both the arrival board and the baggage claim board. I went up to the ticket counter, but it was closed until 4am tomorrow. The Delta office near the baggage claim was empty. I called home and got a message from my father-in-law on my answering machine saying my mother-in-law was still in Atlanta waiting for a flight on standby. I managed to get a 1-800 number for Delta. I called them and after working my way through the phone tree, I got a guy with a thick Indian accent. He said her name was Brandon. Yeah right! I could barely understand the guy. After asking him to repeat himself many times, I managed to get the info that my mother-in-law was in Atlanta waiting for a flight on standby. The next flight isn’t until tomorrow morning. So I waited at the airport for over an hour for a flight that was cancelled! And to add insult to injury, I ended up paying $3 in parking fees for the privlage of waiting for a non-existant flight!
Delta sucks!
We enjoyed digging and screening for emeralds and other gemstones down in North Carolina. We looked for some place closer to us in New York. There really isn’t much in the way of good gemstones in New York. Oh well. But there are the Herkimer “Diamond” mines over in the eastern part of the state.
We had known about the Herkimer Diamond mines for years, but had never been there. We decided it might fun to try. Our wedding anniversary was coming up, so I thought it would be fun for us to get away, and maybe trying digging for “diamonds”.
Herkimer Diamonds are not real diamonds, but are double terminated, water clear quartz crystals. Supposedly they are rarer than real diamonds. Rare or not, they are nowhere near as valuable as real diamonds.
There are several Herkimer Diamond mining places. I did some research, and several reports seemed to indicate that Crystal Grove was the best place to get diamonds.
I took Friday off from work. We left about 8am and arrived at Crystal Grove a little after 11am. I had reserved a cabin weeks earlier. We checked in, paid for a couple days of mining, and unloaded some of our stuff in the cabin. The cabin smelling great, like freshly cut wood.
Then we headed down to the mine. There are actually several mining locations, but the proprietor said the Tears of Wenedi mine was the best. I had bought various tools such as a new sledge, shovel, wedges, and crack hammers. I made some wedges from spring steel leaf springs as mentioned in various articles. So the first place I headed to was the wall. A couple serious guys were already working on one piece of the wall. I found some other places, trying to find some cracks. I found some small cracks, and worked on splitting them open. Within the first few blows of the hammer on the chisel, I managed to hit my knuckle and was bleeding all over the place. It didn’t hurt, and eventually I got it to stop bleeding. I did succeed in splitting off some small pieces of rock, but only revealed more rock. Over the weekend I did learn more about how to split off big chunks of rock by watching the two guys. They broke off a huge amount of rock.
When trying to break off chunks of rock wasn’t working, I tried breaking smaller chunks of rock with the crack hammer. This wasn’t very productive either. My wife chose to dig over in the soft dirt, and she was managing to find some stuff.
I started searching the ground, looking for flashes of reflected lights. This was producing more than digging at the wall or breaking rocks.
I hooked up with a guy named Dave and he showed me how he was finding diamonds. He was filling a bucket with dirt, and then screening it in one of the mud puddles. Fortunately I had brought one of my screens from home. This method worked very well and was very productive. The trick with this method was where to get your dirt. I tried digging mud out of the puddles, dug dirt from the base of the wall, dug dirt out in the open. The best place seemed to be long the base of the wall. Dave asked the couple serious guys if he could take dirt from where they were working and they said okay. I asked them too, and they said okay for me too. This produced the best stuff. Much of what we found were shards of broken Herks. But I kept most of these thinking my wife might still be able to use them for her crafting. But I found many small doubly terminated crystals, crystals with attachment points, and crystals still attached to small pieces of rock. I also found chunks of calcite, and rocks with what I think were dolomite crystals. Anyway, I did this for two days in a row and feel like I was beaten with a baseball bat. It was hard work!
My wife had our dog on a leash, went and dug in the soft dirt that was in the shade most of the day. She found some nice stuff too, but not nearly as much as I got. It was nice that we were able to bring our dog and not have to check her into a kennel.
The campground itself was nice. The cabin was clean and had a small space heater as well as a ceiling fan. The ceiling fan didn’t seem to do much however. I think it was mounted too close to the ceiling. Opening the windows and get a cross draft worked better. The bathrooms were clean. The showers were decent. They are different in that you have to pull a cord to get water, which will shut off when you release the cord. So you end up showering with one hand up in the air and scrubbing with the other.
Check out was the only issue. We packed our car up and were ready to leave before 8am. But there was nowhere to leave the cabin key. There was a drop box to leave checkin stuff for overnight arrivals, but the slot was too narrow for the key chain to fit. The office was scheduled open at 8am, but according to their website, they may not open till 10am early in the season. Fortunatly the manager came out to check on her dog which was barking at our dog, and I was able to give her the key.
I enjoyed our visit, and would like to come back sometime.
Crystal Grove is located at 161 County Highway 114, St. Johnsville, NY 13452. Their phone number is 1-800-KRY-DIAM. They have a website at: http://www.crystalgrove.com