When I pulled into the drive this evening, I had 1192 miles on the odo. A few minutes ago, I figured I could go by a local monogram shop to see if they were still open. They weren't. Too bad.

While I was out, I decided I might want to drive by the Blockbuster on the other side of town ( small town, not the entire metro area ). After that, I had 1199 miles, and was approximately 4 miles from my house. When it finally ticked over to 1200, I was in the middle of a bunch of cars, travelling extremely slowly, on the main highway through the town. I turned off, then again to get to the last road to my neighborhood. I waited until noone was around, and took off(I didn't do a proper launch; don't know how to do that correctly yet in a stick). I ran it to just under 6000rpms and shifted to 2nd. To my surprise, the rear tires actually barked. Not chirped. But barked. Alas, at that speed, I was about 20 feet from the entrance to my neighborhood, so I couldn't play any more.

Impressions:
One of the complaints that I have read from the automotive press is that the clutch is balky at high rpms. No crap. When I shifted at 6000, it felt like my foot was against one of those back-massage things(riiiight.. back massagers). I imagine it's nothing more than engine vibration, but still, it was much worse than I expected.

The next thing I noticed was the fact when I pressed the clutch at 6k, there was this amazing engine wail while the engine was winding down until I got it back into 2nd.

Another thing that got my attention was the time it took to go from 4000 to 6000 rpms was amazing. I had an idea of what to expect from playing around with the manumatic mode of the 04. But it was still exciting.

Lastly, the car lurched when I shifted from 1st to 2nd, quite violently I might add. I imagine that some fraction of this force is expected. The rest, however, has got to be due to my inexperience.

Anyway, it was a blast. When I walked in the door, I had this grin on my face like the first time I saw "boobies"

Now I've got to figure out some other errand that must absolutely be run right now, not tomorrow.

Here's to learning high-performance manual driving.