Cross-Country Corvette, Stage 1: 302 kms

Date of Travel: April 30, 2015

Arriving at the Edmonton airport on April 30, 2015, we were met by a gentleman from Stetson Motors, who took us in his well-used minivan 133 kms to the southwest and the dealership in Drayton Valley, Alberta.  It took a moment to locate our car, surrounded as it was entirely by a sea of big pickup trucks.  Drayton Valley is in the heart of oil production country and there is probably not much call for low-slung sports cars, particularly since all the roads except primary ones appeared to be gravel.

The car was detailed to perfection and I was invited to take it out for a drive.  While sitting in the parking lot, we went through all the controls, from seat heating switches to turn signals to the horn and audio system and everything checked out.  I had only been a passenger in my friend Bill's car as he had some kind of weird finicky racing transmission so I preferred not to drive it; this was actually my first time driving a Corvette ever.  I had read the Owner's Manual while still at home and was pretty familiar with the controls but as we left the dealership I was impressed with how easy the car was to shift.  It took far less effort that many of the German cars I had rented in Europe.  As before, I was impressed with the excellent visibility but now in control I could also see just how powerful the car was as we opened it up along a straight stretch of very deserted road.  The NPP exhaust cut-out gave an impressive roar as we accelerated and suddenly we were were at 150 km/h, with the car feeling as if it was just getting started.  On the return to the dealership, I tried an acceleration in a lower gear and could feel the back end immediately start to swing out.  436 hp needs to be treated with respect but it was not hard to control again.

There was some paperwork to complete and a document from the local branch of the Royal Bank and the car was ours.  The last thing was to go to the license office and obtain a temporary permit to allow us to ferry the car home.  We were allowed one week and the requirement is to go as directly as possible.

A quick lunch at the local Tim Horton's and then it was time to hit the road.  My GPS must have been set incorrectly as instead of heading east we found ourselves continuing west somehow along AB 16 via Hinton and after three hours we found ourselves in the Jasper National Park.  Shortly after passing the entrance we came to a hill where a large congregation of  bighorn sheep so of course we had to stop and look at them.  The road through the park provides views of lovely scenery; I had not realized that Linda had never seen mountains before!

In the summer I suspect the road is very heavily travelled but on this last day of April there was almost nobody else driving.  We gradually meandered through the vistas of mountains, rivers and forest to the very nice Sawridge Inn, where we fortunately had made a reservation (!), just outside the town of Jasper itself.  The receptionist had a name badge with a very German name and when I asked it turned out that he was in fact from Germany and was delighted to have a conversation with me in German.

It had been a long day between the flight, the three hour time difference and five hours in various vehicles, including our new one.  The Corvette was proving itself to be a very comfortable long distance cruiser, Cadillac-like when you enjoyed the stereo and the leather seats and the surprisingly quiet interior, Corvette-like when you pushed the loud pedal or steered through tight corners.  I particularly enjoyed the Heads Up Display, which my friend Bill insisted was a great feature to get, and he was right.

Up bright and early the next morning, we celebrated the arrival of May with an excellent breakfast at the hotel and then drove into Jasper itself and walked around the town for a while.  Jasper (population 4,000) was first established a Northwest Company trading post in 1813.  The Grand Trunk Railway established a siding in the city and there is a very charming station, built in 1926.

Jasper is the terminus for the Rocky Mountaineer train trips through the Rockies and we saw one of the "vista coaches" being washed while we walked by.

The architecture of the town is Western Rugged and a lot of stone is used, to good effect,  There is a very nice Visitor Centre as well as the usual stores you will find in a town that lives from tourism.  The Visitor Centre itself was designated a Heritage Building in 1992.  It was constructed in 1914 and served as the administrative office for the park.

Jasper Visitor Centre Historic Site

It was time to load up the car and head to our next destination, Banff, driving along the famous Icefield Parkway.

Our Automotive Blog Begins!

Middle-aged crisis purchase?  My new pride and joy: a 2008 C6 Corvette Coupe, April 2015

I have long been interested in cars: their history, their technology, their effect on society.  However, I have never owned a vehicle that was particularly out of the ordinary except for a 1981 Nissan 280ZX Turbo two-seater which I drove from 1983 until 1995, when it basically fell apart due to rust and the 240,000 kms we had put on it over the years.  With its 180 hp it was considered blindingly fast in its time, going from 0-60 mph in 7.4 seconds.  Fuel consumption did not seem too bad back then: 11 litre/100 km (21 mpg/US) in the city and 10 litre/100 km (23 mpg/US) on the highway.  It was an automatic with cloth seats and the t-bar top with removable glass panels.  It had really nice snowflake-pattern wheels.  It looked a lot like this:

And now all these years later I find myself with another silver two-seater with a removable top and nice wheels but seemingly from another world.  Purchased on April 30, 2015, the car is a 2008 C6 Corvette Coupe with no less than 436 hp from its naturally-aspirated LS3 V-8 engine.  Claimed 0-60 time is around 4.1 seconds although I don't think my shifting of the manual six speed transmission is going to match that kind of racing driver time.  Fuel consumption for such a high-performance vehicle is remarkably good: 16 litre/100 km (14.3 gal/US) in the city and 7.5 lire/100 km (31 mpg/US) on the highway.  Well, city mileage is clearly not that great but this car is meant for the open road anyway.

The car is an alphabet soup: a C6 LS3 3LT Z51 6MT with NPP!  This means it is the 6th generation of Corvette, which was built from 2005 to 2013, with the revised V-8 engine introduced in 2008 and having a six-speed manual gearbox.  The Z51 is an optional updated performance package including upgraded suspension and brakes with drilled rotors and the NPP option is a dual-mode exhaust that opens up a butterfly valve above 3500 rpm, unleashing an impressive sound and an extra 6 hp.  The 3LT signifier indicates the level of trim in the car and this one has most everything except navigation and magnetic ride control--powered memory seats with lumbar control, heated mirrors and seats, a fantastic Heads Up Display (HUD) unit, a complex Driver Information Centre that provides lots of data about what is happening at any given moment, a 6-CD Bose sound system and a lot of other interesting and useful stuff that will be expensive to fix if it breaks.  The car also features a blue-tinted removable Lexan targa-style top, so one can enjoy open air motoring with all the practicality of a coupe.  Our car was in excellent condition, having only 30,991 kms on the clock, and two small scratches, on the mirror and air dam, as well as a bit of spiderwebbing on the plastic covers over the headlights, a common C6 issue.

I had made a long list of potential car candidates for our sporting/touring future, with a Mustang GT near the top of the list but also considering a lightly used Porsche 911 or Cayman, a BMW Z4M or at least a Z4 Coupe, and a car I enjoyed driving once as a rental in Europe, the Toyota 86, which is sold in North America as the Subaru BRZ and Scion FRS.  Cars that appealed but which I did not really focus on included the Cadillac CTS Coupe, the Mazda MX-5 Miata, the Mercedes-Benz SLK and the BMW Z4 Roadster.  The Cadillac was very rare and the other three were really too small for the kind of long trips we were considering.

Doing my research, I was surprised to discover that a used but low-mileage Corvette was less expensive than a newish Mustang GT.  I also knew that the Mustang was about to be replaced with a totally revised model, which made it less appealing, whereas the C6 Corvette had already been supplanted by the C7 in 2014 and was already deep into Depreciation Country.  And of the Corvettes on offer, we clearly wanted a 2008 or newer C6 base model, preferably with the Z51 package.  In 2008 changes were made to improve the car's engine, transmission and steering and the premium over the older cars was not significant.  Having driven manual transmission rental cars in Germany, I felt I was at last prepared to own my first stick shift car after 42 years of driving!

Knowing nothing very much about Corvettes, I looked at various websites where cars were offered for sale.  Canada is not prime sales territory for a high-performance car like this so I looked through a lot of  advertisements for US cars as well.  Bringing a car from the US is a bit of trouble, as I had discovered when returning from an assignment in Washington, DC, with a Mazda Millenia in 2007, but it was doable.  Plus the electronic systems in the Corvette could simply be switched over to metric with the push of a button.  We joined the Capital Corvette Club before buying a car so I had the opportunity to ask questions.

My Corvette Guru, Bill, explained some of the things to look for in a car.  Instead of the 2010 very low-mileage Grand Sport I found in Michigan, he suggested going with a better-equipped car as a base model would not be as good for the road trips we wanted to do.  He took me for a ride in his car, the first time I had even sat in a Corvette except for a brief ride in a C3 twenty-five years ago, and I was impressed by the comfort of the car, its roominess and visibility and, obviously, its insane level of performance and dramatic good looks.  Sold!

In the end we went with a Canadian car which was two years older and $15,000 less but much better equipped, as noted above, than the Michigan car.  A total of 643 Corvettes were exported to Canada in 2008, with 212 being the regular coupe, 181 convertibles, and, surprisingly, 250 were the higher-performance and considerably more expensive Z06 model. 35,310 Corvettes in all were built that year, the same year that GM went into bankruptcy.  Production was to plunge the next year as the worldwide recession hit, totaling only 16,956.

Our car was being sold by a Chevrolet dealership in Alberta as a Certified Pre-Owned car.  I could get a GM extended warranty, as well as have installation of a "clear bra," the protective plastic layer now being used on a lot of sportscars and which we saw on Jay Leno's car program, before the purchase.  What sealed the deal was being able to get a pair of cheap one-way seats to fly to Edmonton and a plan was hatched to bring the new-to-us car home and see a lot of Canada that we had never seen.  But that is the next installment!