Made it back in one piece

Two posts in one month! holiday has been good to me. I spent the last few days in Portland giving my daughter her a proper introduction to my true love, the beach. She saw so many beaches in such a few days it was crazy, Frenchman's Cove, San San bay, Boston Bay, Long Bay and finally she stamped her name in the Visitors book of the Morant Point Lighthouse at the east most point of our little island.

I have always wanted to go to this remote lighthouse but I had neither the knowledge nor equipment(capable car,maps) to get there. This trip was quickly placed back on the table once I got the Jimny and my GPS unit sorted out. It takes about half an hour of driving through farm tracks that are surrounded by cane fields as fars as the eye can see. When you think things are bad you then leave the cane fields and drive for approximately another half an hour on a dirt track through the bush, with no cell reception and mud holes to potentially get stuck in. My car is pretty slim and it still barely fit on the path, there were bushes on both sides of the track that ensured the doors couldn't open. As a budding cartographer I have documented this journey here for others to follow as getting the coordinates to chart my way through this unmapped land was my other major hurdle.

This beach makes the trip through the bush totally worth it, the only people around were a one or two fisher folk doing some spear fishing. The water was clear and the sand powdery, the only thing you would need is a rake to clean up the sea weed and the random drift garbage. Blogspot does not do my photo any justice so if you want to see a much higher resolution version check out my panoramio page.

The photo on the left shows part of the smoother nicer path through low bush leading up to the light house. Don't be fooled though this is a like a freshly paved highway compared to other places you will have to drive through. My recommendations for those who would also like to make this trip?
1. A vehicle with 4x4 low gears.. I suspect the newer suv's with "full time 4wd" may have skipped out on these gears in their transfer box.
2. A GPS programmed with the coordinates I have provided through openstreetmap above or a friend who knows the way.

The second point is probably the most important one, you wouldn't want to get lost in a cane field, all the paths look the same. If you choose to ignore and want to rough it you could follow the single sign at the end of the cane field and hope for the best.

Objective function changed

My civic had served me well for the past 6 years but it was time for a change, when I bought this car I wanted something high performance and sporty. I have always wondered what my next car would be, I didn't really fancy any of the new cars on the market that I could afford. The civic still runs fine but I am very weary of such an old car that has been through so much. Seeing as I had a young one around now I wanted to shift away from a fast car to one of more utility.. I was also tired of driving such a low car and had to be mindful of how close I park up to the curb, I recently ripped off the front lip after it got hooked on the curb.. *sigh* I wasn't  really a fan of much SUVs apart from the Land Rover 60 since they guzzled gas and most of them were really just SUV body shells on a car chassis *cough* CRV.

Enter: Jimny


I had eyes for this car since I saw how rugged the Suzuki Samurais(Jimny predecessor) were. Picking this car was a very controversial move as everyone hates it(with a capital H). I didn't care much though it just means that it will less likely to be stolen. It also ment that finding one would prove to be very difficult, I searched the usual Sunday classified ads in the Gleaner week after week and nobody had any listed for sale. Some quick research revealed that these rugged cars often had owners that will not part ways with their vehicles, one is either a Jimny lover or a Jimny hater, there was no one in between. After 6 weeks of searching I only saw maybe 3 old Jimnys  that did not meet my criteria listed for sale in the classifieds and I figured this would be a waiting game as the used car dealers did not carry them and the local owners were not letting go of any.

I eventually found a dealer that had 2 that met my standards and my mechanic gave them the green light so I dropped a stack and got a '06 manual transmission Jimny. Surprisingly I could draw from my knowledge of 11 years ago when I was learning to drive and the transition back to manual transmission was relatively smooth. Can I say I love this tiny car? I have gotten a bit adventurous and even dusted off my gps reciever and power inverter and captured some data.

This is data from my trip as I left work one afternoon around 4:30pm and traveled from my downtown office to home. The top graph shows the speed(traffic was horrible! look at all of the dead spots) and the bottom graph shows the height above sea level. For those of you who haven't gone metric yet it starts at around 50 feet and goes up to 450. I have done a little bit of off roading so far and it has been great, I'll post more on that later. This last image is a plot on a map of the captured gps coordinates, I cropped off the last bit that detailed the final turns to my apartment.. the gps is surprisingly accurate, don't want any unwanted visitors.