Oddball Update

Attempting to honor my “I’ve gotta get out more” remarks of a few weeks ago, today I got together with Mike, a fellow 2006 GTO owner and member of the LS1GTO message boards who came across me quite by accident. He was looking at the pictures of my cars that I’ve got online when he realized that my garage looked familiar. Turns out he lives in a development right down the road, built by the same builder that constructed our community, and in the same model house, to boot.

My car was still dirty from the rain I’ve been driving in, so last night — with still more storms threatening — I washed it and applied tire dressing foam, then this morning I vacuumed and dusted the interior. With a fresh coat of Zaino Z2 still giving off its characteristic mirror shine, I headed out into the Florida sun and met Mike for lunch at Beef O’Brady’s. We spent a good amount of time just checking out each other’s cars and shooting the breeze. Mike’s car is the virtual doppelganger to mine, with two exceptions — a black interior, and aside from the silver grilles, no Sport Appearance Package. He also has an entirely custom exhaust system that sounds awesome while still retaining the stock round exhaust tips.

I had a great time. We mostly talked cars, but also miscellaneous stuff. What I found refreshing about Mike was that he wasn’t living every minute of his life with his car. A lot of car buffs are so hardcore, unless you’re into it headfirst as your major (or only) hobby, you can’t compete on their level, even in conversation. By contrast, Mike seems to take the same approach as me — and he also is kept pretty busy with work most of the time — so the fact that I didn’t have twenty coats of Zaino and $6,000 worth of mods on my car didn’t make me look like a poser.

Being a complete oaf, I took a camera but forgot to use it, so I have no pictures to display. We only hung around for a couple hours, but next time we get together I’ll remember to take some pictures of the two goats together. (Oh — and I also finally have someone to share horror stories with about the Pontiac dealer downtown…what a freakin’ disaster area.) On the way home I got caught under a cloudburst for a few minutes, but by the time I had raced back to my garage, the car was almost completely dry. Gotta love fresh polish. I couldn’t even put a towel on the hood because it kept sliding off.

Today’s outing was great, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to have some fun with the car. And we’re both definitely up for a repeat performance.

Categorized as Cars, Cars/GTO