Step one: go three feet away from the rest of camp at night in the outback
Step two: turn on your headlight and look around
Step three: realize that every glittering dot out there is a spider
Step four: climb on top of the trailer and resolve to sleep there for the rest of the trip
There is a peculiar mix of terror and boredom that comes from driving a solar car.
The first few miles are exciting, especially on a new car. There's that great new car smell, and you get to play around with the dynamics and steering of the car.
The next few miles just feel like the beginning of a road trip. You're still fresh and alert, the day is young, and holy crap it's a solar car.
Half an hour later you are much less excited. You wriggle around, trying to find a better way to sit, and you inevitably turn the steering wheel a tiny bit. You correct instantly, but not fast enough: chase saw the swerve and calls out "chase solarcar, watch your lane." You find a comfortable position and settle in for another three hours of driving.
In another hour or so, you are bored out of your mind. You sang out loud until you realized that it's too loud to even hear your own voice. You conjugated verbs in Latin and Russian and Spanish. You pretended you were flying a spaceship and shooting down enemy ships. You've tried every possible seating position. There are still two hours left.
An hour later you're still bored, but the boredom is tempered by terror. You're sleepy and tired. You haven't even noticed the scenery passing because you were so focused on staying between the lines. You are sick of hearing "watch your lane" from chase. What else could you possibly be watching?
For the next forty-five minutes you are hyper-focused. Nothing would be worse than driving this car off the road. You blink constantly and sweep your eyes left to right. You watch for the little green signs every ten kilometers that tell you how far you have to go before your shift ends. Every time you pass a sign you do the same math over again, converting speed and distance into time left in the box.
The last fifteen minutes are agonizing. Driving into the control stop is a relief. The vibration finally stops and you can close your eyes for a long moment. You unclip your radio, undo your seatbelt, and make sure you're not leaving anything in the car. Then you open the door and bail out as quickly as possible, taking care to not shade the array.
When you get out somebody hands you a sandwich and a water bottle. You take off your helmet and shrug your shoulders to loosen them. You drink, you eat, and suddenly you feel human again.
At the end of the control stop you jump into an air-conditioned car and listen to music while you watch the world go by. After half an hour you feel ready to drive again. After all, what's better than driving a solar car?
On our third day out in the outback we drove north to Coober Pedy and spent the night in an underground hostel inside an old opal mine. It was pretty sick. We also gave up on eating only pasta with red sauce and made a giant pile of meat, a giant pile of veggies, and a giant pot of rice.
Our drive north was spent doing race team practice: tire changes, control stops, and all of the other little things that we need to be able to do quickly and well. The most exciting one was definitely our practice passing other teams as a convoy.
We decided that simply passing one of our vehicles when we were all on the same channel and aware of each other was not realistic, so we added a twist: one set of cars spoke only English on channel one of our radios, while the other spoke only Spanish on channel two. As chase radio I was responsible for bridging this gap with my incredibly broken high school Spanish. It turns out that reading in Spanish and speaking Spanish are different skills.
The result? "¡HOLA CHILE!" as a salutation, because the best way to communicate is as loudly as possible.
Things turned into even more of a shitshow when a road train pulled up behind us and asked to pass on the CB radio. Suddenly we had three radios talking at once, all in different languages. I hear max has video, and I hope I never have to watch it.
Passing worked in the end, and we repeated the exercise with every driver and in different languages. All of the practice paid off on our mock race, when we passed a car for real with no hiccups at all.
Not many pictures in this post, because it was mostly driving and we've already been through this stretch of road five times. Here's Luminos on the array stand.
(Written September 23rd)
Hello from Port Augusta! This is our second time here; we booked it here from Adelaide, camped for a night, then headed out to the outback for four days. Our fourth day was a full day of race driving from Coober Pedy to Port Augusta, and today was our rest day.
(Pic: our tents at 7:30 am on our rest day. Emergency measures were taken to make the tents stop inverting themselves in the wind.)
Our first day out of Port Augusta started around noon and involved a leisurely drive up to the lovely town of Glendambo. We spent the drive working out our radio protocols, talking about road trains, and getting used to our new vehicles.
Glendambo is a big town by outback standards, which means it has all of two gas stations and a bar. It also has about two million flies. Eric bought a fly net and I decided to rock a bandana and my dbx hat to keep them off my face. The nice thing about flies in the outback is that they go to sleep shortly after sunset and don't come back out until approximately nine AM.
(Pic: bandana and safety vest. Stylish.)
At the end of the day we tested our new array stand. In the wise words of Ian Girard, "It'll do."
Array standing for our team takes a fair amount of work because we have to lift the entire car, not just the top shell. (On Xenith and previous cars the top shell was removable.) We've decided that holding up the array stand is going to replace hitting the gym as a way to keep our team in shape. And it also gives rise to some great jokes: when Greg found all three girls on the team (and one guy) holding up the array stand, he asked us how all of that leaning in was working out for us.
The next day we did short speed runs just north of Glendambo to characterize the power draw of the car at a variety of speeds with our new black edition motors. I drove the morning shift, which was my first time driving Luminos at a reasonable speed. She's touchy and the bubble is hard to see through, but she's a solar car all right-and therefore awesome.
(Pic: panorama at Glendambo with a full moon.)
When I get another chance to write I'll put up a post about days three and four in the outback. Tomorrow we're heading out for a three day mock race to test our strategy. I don't have a whole lot of pictures because I've been pretty busy, but here's the outback:
(Pics: somewhere between Pimba and Port Augusta. It's pretty flat.)
Remember last post, when I said the next post would be from the outback? That was a lie. In fact, we're still in Adelaide.
Our workspace at Solitaire VW is a warehouse with all of the comforts of home: running water, a roof to keep off the rain, and a machine inside the main building that makes seven different kinds of coffee. Anna tried all of them in a single day.
(Pic: Anna crashing, about a day later.)
On our first day here Ian asked if I like power tools, then gave me a drill and told me to fasten down the roof on our trailer.
(Pics: Our trailer!)
On the second day my weapon of choice was a paintbrush, and we made the trailer spiffy. The trailer has a main bay for the car and an attic for team and personal gear. All of the panels that enclose the attic have hinges so we have easy access. The attic is just tall enough that you think you can crawl through it, and just short enough that you can't. Guess who gets to go up there when we need to move stuff around?
(Pic: The attic.)
Some of those hinges had wood screws sticking out, and I got a few nice cuts on them. So on the third day Ian handed me an angle grinder and told me to take my revenge. Angle grinders are awesome.
While we've been working on the trailer, car tie-downs, and array stand, Darren and Greg have been disassembling the suspension and installing the new "black edition" motors that NHS and Sam Lenius finished right before we headed out.
(Pics: Darren and Greg working on the car; motor and upright partly installed.)
In a futile attempt to stay on race time all the way until the race starts, we've been rolling out of our hostel earlier every morning. Today was 7:30 am. The result is a lot of progress and a very tired team.
(Pic: Darren, not actually working on the car.)
Meanwhile, Nathan has been hard at work on our tents.
(Pic: Hax.)
Hello from Adelaide! We spent the last two days driving on the Great Ocean Road from Melbourne to Adelaide, and now we're back with our old friends at solitaire VW, getting the car and trailer ready to hit the outback.
After twenty hours on airplanes and in airports it was nice to be on the open road-especially when that road was one of the great driving roads of the world. We stopped in Lorne for lunch (pb&j and fish and chips) and talked to a German dude with a sweet quadcopter. It had an asymmetrical design and a range of 2 km, plus an autopilot that could get it safely back home to you if you lost track of where you were. The guy flying it had added an Oculus Rift hooked up to a camera on the front to make flying even more fun. We tried to get some details out of him but, being German, he primarily answered in monosyllables.
(Pic: Rachel, hedgehog, and a crashed paper airplane in Lorne.)
The next place we stopped was at the Twelve Apostles. My camera couldn't do justice to them, so stay tuned for real photos.
(Pic: Anna and hedgehog at the Twelve Apostles.)
We spent the night in Warrnambool-probably my favorite name so far-and I passed out as soon as I hit my bed and didn't wake up for eleven hours. Jet lag!
In the morning we meet some very friendly, somewhat damp golden retrievers, then headed out for another chill day of driving. I stuck with Nathan and we went up the B1 by the Coorong for a scenic drive. We also ran into mosquitoes than I've ever seen in my life. It sounded like it was raining, but that was actually just the sound of thousands of mosquitoes dying on our windshield.
(Pic: Nathan with the dog he wished he could keep.)
We pulled off the road when we saw a sign for a sinkhole, having no idea what to expect. It turns out that Australians are weird, and there is therefore a town in Australia that had both a giant sinkhole and someone with enough money and time to turn it into a park, with fountains and terraces.
(Pic: A hole.)
We also saw Larry the lobster, which "is considered the most impressive of Australia's Big Things." I'll let you judge.
(Pic: A rather large lobster.)
Now we're in Adelaide. The next few days should be pretty quiet: trailer and car work in the daytime, watching Australian rules football at night. The next post will either be photos or be from the outback.
Cheers,
Rachel
P.s. The way I'm writing these posts doesn't allow me to embed photos in the middle, so for now they'll all be at the end and you can just match them with the captions. I'll see what I can do about that later.
(Pic: Australian road signs are great.)
Warmups: so far we've had a few short hikes to test new equipment and make sure that we're okay with traveling with each other. Last weekend Nathan Golshan and I went for a leisurely overnight trip in the Desolation Wilderness. We hiked to Upper Velma Lake and slept in our hammocks by the lake. It was the best night's sleep I've had in a long time. Nathan caught (and released) a few fish, and we tested out his new stove by making a pot of delicious Mac and cheese. I know Nathan took some pictures, so stay tuned for his post with photos.
Introductions: this year there will be five of us traveling together after the race. We have Nathan Golshan, photographer and tentmaker extraordinaire; Anna Olson, who plays the stop sign in the Stanford band; Darren Chen, a member of our crack mechanical team; Wesley Ford, team lead and ostensible cs major; and Rachel Fenichel, who will be happy as a clam if she only eats PB&J on half of the days that we're in New Zealand.
Our team's official website is at solarcar.stanford.edu if you want some background on who we are and what we'll be doing in Australia. I'll try to post frequent updates but I make no guarantees about how often I'll have internet access while I'm abroad.
Darren and I are about to hop on a plane; the next post will be from Australia!
(Pic: hedgehog at the airport, ready for adventures.)
