Stargazer's Garage

GM Nav Disc Center Boy, am I impressed! I knew before we bought our 2007 GMC Yukon XL Denali that one of the things that I would miss would be Honda's excellent implementation of the factory navigation system. However, I discovered that even though some system features are lacking, GM goes leaps and bounds ahead of Honda in terms of customer support. The navigation disc that came with our vehicle was from 2005 (Version 1.10, Part #15807780) and quite old with many roads and POIs missing or incomplete. Using the GM Nav Disc Center website, I discovered that there was a 2008 update available. When I entered my VIN to place an order I found out that it didn't work! This morning I made a call to the toll-free number... ...and everything was corrected and updated in a professional and efficient manner. On top of that, they are sending me the new updated navigation disc for free ! GM offers a subscription program that gives owners of all new North American 2006 and 2007 model year G...

I've been spending the last few days cleaning up our 2006 Honda Odyssey Touring and 2006 Subaru Impreza WRX STI to get ready for the trade-in. It was interesting seeing them transform from being our own customized and personalized family vehicles into generic modes of transportation. It was kind of sad in a way because having those personal touches gave them.... ...a little extra character that made them a part of our family. Like a trusty pack horse, the Odyssey performed its duty well and had enough nooks and storage areas to keep all of Dora's backpack items and Barbie's shoes and purses hidden for months and months until they were long forgotten by my kids who put them there. One of things I took out from the Odyssey yesterday was a toy elephant that had fallen under Aston's seat. That elephant, originally from the National Zoo in Washington, DC, had been living under there for a long time! I realized that each time I removed something from the Ody like the kids...

Motel Cafe Lounge Originally uploaded by istargazer . 2006 Honda Odyssey Fuel Consumption - Road Trip 2007: Vancouver, BC to Thunder Bay, ON to Washington, DC I was working on calculating the fuel consumption data for our 2006 Honda Odyssey Touring during our trip to Oregon when I realized that I had some data from our road trip last year that I don't remember blogging. Unfortunately, the data only includes the first half our trip all the way to Washington, DC but not the data on the way back. I got sidetracked and lost motivation to enter the rest of the information. However, I think the information is valuable so you can check out the specifics for each fill-up here: Honda Odyssey Fuel Consumption - Road Trip 2007 Combined (City/Highway) Fuel Consumption Summary: Vancouver - Thunder Bay - Washington, DC Total distance traveled: 3472.2km + 4689.0km = 8161.2km (6071.11 miles) Total fuel used: 919 L (243 gallons) Average speed: 90 km/h (56 mph) Best observed fuel consumpti...

Ronayers.com Fiche Desktop I found this really neat site that allows you to look part parts for Honda, Suzuki, Kawasaki, and Yamaha ATVs, motorcycles, motor scooters and other recreational motorsport equipment. Here is the fiche for the 2005 Suzuki Burgman 400 .

CarsWithoutBorders . » Honda Canada Thinks Canadians are stupid! I'm not the only one noticing Honda Canada's excessive markup! The $10,000 price difference between Canada and the US is preventing me from buying another Honda.

Red Lobster, Salem, Oregon Originally uploaded by istargazer . We went down to Oregon last week for a few nights and no trip to the United States would be complete without a trip to a Red Lobster restaurant :0) This was Day 2 after spending the day at the Portland Children's Museum to tie-dye some T-shirts and the Oregon Zoo to see their robotic Dinosaur exhibit. We stopped at the Woodburn Company Stores outlet mall to exchange a shirt I had bought and went down to Salem for dinner. Service was very good and super fast and the food was delicious! I brought along my Sony GPS data logger again, but I've had some problems matching up the photos with the data. I guess I hadn't used it in about a year and the unit had a hard time syncing with the nav satellites. All the data was offset buy a few hours. I'll try to upload the other pictures when I get a chance. This picture is geotagged but I did it manually through Google Earth. You can view it on the Flickr Map .

This week I've looked at 3 different vehicles to be possible candidates to replace our Honda Odyssey and Subaru Impreza STI: The 2008 Land Rover LR3, the 2008 Toyota Sequoia, and the 2009 Honda Pilot. In the end, I feel like I've just ended up where I started from. There is no perfect vehicle and choosing one is a matter of choosing which compromises I'm going to be willing to live with. The truth of it is, I think our Honda Odyssey is a pretty good vehicle for us despite my shallowness in refusing to accept the fact that we are a minivan family. Maybe for passenger space it's not the best and it doesn't have 4WD, but it sure excels in cargo space and convenience. (And don't tell anyone, but sometimes I look at our minivan and I think it looks pretty good-- for a minivan .) It's really hard to justify making a change in vehicles for only minor improvements in certain areas while giving up things in other areas. So, now what? I have such a short attention spa...

SUMMARY: 2009 Honda Pilot EX-L PROS: Mid-size SUV with 8-passenger seating, improved looks, 4WD traction, well-designed storage area behind 3rd row. CONS: Average handling and performance; Canadian MSRP for Touring trim (NAV + RES) is $10,000 more than US MSRP. ____________________ Yesterday afternoon I went out to the Honda dealership to show my wife the new 2009 Honda Pilot. This is the newly redesigned 2nd generation that has a controversial boxier look and new grille. A lot of people comment online about how much they dislike (hate) the look, but I like it. I actually like it much better than the original Pilot which I thought looked too bland.... This was my second look at it. After the first time, I got quite excited because I could see how wide the 2nd row was. Honda provides 3 LATCH attachments in the 2nd row in addition to one more in the 3rd row. This is more than most vehicles of this size. I was also excited because on YouTube I found more information about the storage ar...

This is a follow-up to this post I made a couple days ago about the grinding brakes on my Honda Odyssey . The service reminder on the dash board indicated that I needed a Service B, so I made an appointment at my dealership. This was actually a very pleasurable experience because I was able to do everything through email and they were able to answer some questions I had about the brakes.... I mentioned the grinding brakes and the service advisor explained that the "B" Service included servicing the brakes. He quoted me prices to replace the pads/rotors if that didn't fix the problem. I mentioned my declining confidence in the OEM brake pads and he said that Honda had reformulated the pads. We could talk about after-market replacements if needed when they actually diagnosed the problem. The problem turned out to be warped rotors (again) and lucky for me, repairs were carried under warranty (again). During the service they also fixed a rattle on the driver-side second row s...

Follow-up of 2006 Honda Odyssey Brake Repair Under Warranty Thankfully, we made through our cross-continent road trip last summer without any brake issues and there were no times I needed to use the brakes in an emergency situation. However, now at 31500 km, the grinding problem has returned. The brakes grind under moderate to heavy braking and also when the brakes have been heated from repeated stops. It does NOT inspire confidence. I do not believe that my 2006 Honda Odyssey will be able to perform an emergency stop.... Since Honda only seemed to put a band-aid fix on my brakes last time, I'm going to look for an aftermarket solution to improve the brake performance on my 2006 Honda Odyssey. Wish me luck! UPDATE: Grinding Brakes repaired under warranty

One of the best things I did to prepare for our road trip across the United States this summer was to subscribe to satellite radio. It was really nice to be able to listen to clear, high-quality sound no matter where we were. Also, the variety of stations available to us meant that we never were short of something to listen to. So imagine my concern when our Stratus radio stopped working altogether half-way through our trip.... I started noticing problems when we reached Thunder Bay, Ontario. After we had made the border crossing, the radio reset itself: presets erased, no subscription registration. After a few minutes, it re-registered itself and I was able to listen to music again. While we were in Thunder Bay, I was also observing strange behavior with our GPS so I just brushed off the radio problems to some sort of "satellite Bermuda Triangle phenomenon." As we got farther from the time zone border, the satellite radio continued to reset itself periodically. The annoying...

One of the things I really appreciated during our road trip to Washington, DC was the ceramic window tint that was installed on the Honda Odyssey just before we left. Ceramic tint has excellent heat rejection properties that made a significant difference in our comfort, especially with the 35° C and above weather. One thing that I didn't think about was tinting the sun roof.... The way the sunroof is positioned in the Odyssey, any sunshine that came through would feel uncomfortably intense, so much so that I would have the shade closed almost all of the time--even here in Vancouver. I didn't have that problem at all in our Toyota Sequoia. So when I took my dad in to get his 2007 Infiniti G35 to get tinted, I brought the van in to get the sunroof done also. It only cost about $30 and even though it doesn't look much darker, I can now keep the cover open and let more light in without getting uncomfortable. Here's my original post about getting the Pinnacle Formula One cer...

We stopped at this Cenex station in Rice Lake, Wisconsin for an emergency bathroom break. Luckily enough, it was the first gas station I found that carried NOS energy drink in a bottle. Needless to say, I bought 3 bottles (and a bag of Wisconsin cheddar cheese curds) for the road :0)

Update: Sep 27, 2007 - Our Stratus radio died when we got to DC. After talking to customer service, I bought a new radio from Circuit City. I went with the Starmate 4 because of some additional features I wanted. I also bought a new dash pad to mount it--which I love. It's working great now. We've been in Thunder Bay, Ontario for almost two weeks now and I've been noticing some really strange things happening with our Honda GPS navigation system and our Sirius satellite radio. Thunder Bay is near the boundary of the Eastern Daylight Time Zone in Canada, even though it's hundreds of kilometers west of the EDT boundary in the USA. So when you go across the border from Minnesota to Ontario, you change immediately from Central Daylight Time to Eastern Daylight Time. You can see what I mean on this time zone map of North America . I feel like because we are so close to the boundary between two time zones, our satellite dependent devices like the GPS and radio are going bonke...

Fort William, Thunder Bay, ON. Interestingly enough, Fort William Historical Park can NOT be found anywhere in the Honda's navigation system, but we had no problem finding The Persian Man on the map.

I got the van washed and detailed today at a shop in Thunder Bay on Court Street called Auto One . I looked them up in the phone book and by a matter of coincidence, the manager there used to live in BC and had a auto shop at the corner of Barnet and St. John's. It felt good to get all the bugs off. The shop uses Autoglym products and did a great job on making the black paint look awesome again. They even touched up a rock chip I had. Now the paint surface feels as smooth as silk! Unfortunately, bugs are unavoidable here, so I had to whip out my bottle of Meguiars Quik-Detailer and clean up after the drive home. I did have time to take some pictures in front of an old closed-down restaurant. This place has been closed for a long time--it was just like this two years ago when we last visited. It looks like it's from a time long past....

Here's the data on our fuel consumption for the first part of our trip from Vancouver, BC to Thunder Bay, ON. Fully-loaded with 2 adults, 4 children, roof-top box, electric cooler, clothes, and gear, our best mileage so far has been Day 5 where we got 24 mpg (9.7 L/100 km). Total fuel consumption for the Odyssey is here.

Click here for MAP of Day 2: Spokane to Billings Click here for all of today's photos . Sorry for the late post. I had some issues with the geotagging when we crossed time zones. I'll update this post tomorrow night with a summary of details. For now you can find the Google Map of our progress and a few pictures. Our day ended with a little twist when we arrived at our hotel and found it to be surrounded by water and inaccessible! Today's Summary: Spokane, WA to Billings, Montana Total distance traveled: 912.8 km Estimated travel time (GPS): 7 hours, 43 min. Total elapsed driving time: 8 hours, 16 min. Average fuel consumption: 11.5 L/100 km Average speed: 123 km/h Highest observed outside temp: 30° C Number of confirmed V1 bogies: 1 Grateful for: The "Grade Logic Control" on the Honda Odyssey avoids gear-hunting on uphills and descents, and downshifts for added engine braking. Because today's route took us through mountain passes, this feature was re...

Click here for MAP of Day 1: Vancouver to Spokane . Click here for all of today's photos . 07-07-07: Road Tripalooza begins! Today we started our road trip to Washington, D.C. :0) I bought a GPS data logger so I'm tracking our progress on Google Maps and geotagging the photos I'm taking during the trip. Today's Summary: Vancouver, Canada to Spokane, WA Total distance traveled: 666 km Estimated travel time (GPS): 6 hours, 20 min. Total elapsed driving time: 6 hours, 30 min. Average fuel consumption: 10.8 L/100 km Average speed: 117 km/h Highest observed outside temp: 32° C Number of confirmed V1 bogies: 2 Tip of the Day: Avoid long border lineups by going into the Duty Free shop and buying something, anything. We shortened a projected 1+ hour wait to about 15 minutes by buying a $7.50 mini-bottle of Absolut Vodka. When you exit the store, the attendants direct you to merge back into traffic at the front of the border line. That was $7.50 well invested :0)

Update: added pictures and additional info Advanced Window Tinting (on Westwood in Port Coquitlam) did an excellent job tinting the rear windows on our Odyssey today. Just in time, too, because today's high was around 30° Celcius! The heat rejection with ceramic tint is excellent and the difference was very noticeable. It will definitely make the van much more comfortable during our road trip. Click below for more pictures. I was worried about putting metallic tint on the front windows because the owner's manual specifically warns that it could affect GPS reception (the antenna is under the dash). I was going to put Huper Optik ceramic tint (like the Subaru) but the shop I went to doesn't do automotive tint any more. That's when someone on NASIOC recommended Advanced Window Tint in Port Coquitlam. They carried Formula One Pinnacle Series ceramic tint which, unlike Huper Optik, is designed specifically for automotive use . That's good news because when I installed Hu...