Tag Archives: Mini Cooper

Mr. Whooooo

Leave a reply

This is the eighth post in a series about a UK road trip that starts here.

Rebecca and I spent our first day wandering the Mini United festival grounds.  As I wrote in the last post, Mini owners like to have fun.  Cramming is some people’s idea of fun.

Cramming

I did not participate in the cramming.  The most people I have ever had in my car is five. Two of them were men well over six feet tall.  I remember the elbows and knees everywhere, and only being able to get up to fourth gear because someone’s foot was blocking the gear stick.

I did happily subject myself to a fake pat down by a fake generic police officer.  There are all sorts of things I could write about this, involving naughty British and German stereotypes, but I’ll just say, “Anything for a photo opp with a classic Mini,” and leave it at that.

But Officer

There was a double-decker bus full of overpriced Mini T-shirts, hats, sunglasses, drink glasses, key chains, and lavishly illustrated souvenir books.  I didn’t need to buy anything; I was more than content with my swag bag, which had turned out to contain a bunch of similar Mini trinkets in addition to the bottle opener.

Style Bus

There was lots of racing by professional drivers which I found boring.  I’ve never understood the attraction of watching someone drive around and around and around a track.

But then, there were the trick drivers, a la the Italian Job, accompanied by a DJ.

DJ

We went back to the VIP tent for our evening feeding, then headed out for the headline concert by Paul Weller.  I had never heard of him, or The Jam, his first band. I had never heard The Jam’s number one 1980 hit, Going Underground.  There are probably Americans who would be shocked at that, but I was busy changing diapers and going to school full time back then, so I had other priorities.

But also, back in the day, it was probably more possible and quite common for music not to make it over the pond.  Not every group was the new Beatles or Rolling Stones, but lots of groups, like The Jam, were huge in their home country.

weller

So Rebecca and I jammed, and I never actually saw Paul Weller because, at 5’3”, I never see anything from the main floor but other people’s heads.  There were clearly a lot of drugs in use.  A guy near us was hopping on one foot the whole concert, yelling “Whooo!” over and over and over.  He was as entertaining as the concert itself.

—

It had been a long day and we were barely started on all there was to see and do.

We trudged back to the tent, feeling like First Class passengers forced to return to Coach Economy.  We should have slept soundly but we were so excited about going back the next day that we stayed up talking in the dark.  Besides, Mr. Whooo was camping somewhere nearby, so there was a round of mostly good-natured “Shut up!” from us and our neighbors every 10 minutes until he finally ran out of steam around 3am.

Good on Ya, Gdynia

Leave a reply

This is the seventh post in a series about a UK road trip that starts here.

Rebecca and I were sitting in the VIP tent at the Mini festival, pinching ourselves, when a bunch of loudmouths barged in. Oops, turns out they were my fellow North Americans.

North Ams

Rebecca and I were waved over to join them by a tall woman dressed in black and wearing extreme eyewear.

“I am Dagmar,” she said in a clipped German accent, “head of BMW’s Mini Cooper North American Customer Relations Division,” or some such. “I would like to give you a warm welcome to Silverstone and Mini United.”  She never cracked a smile; she was about as warm as an ice cube.  Dagmar gave us an orientation to the VIP amenities.

“The VIP toilets are over there … these coolers are available to you 24/7 … your feedings will be at oh-eight hundred hours, 1200 hours, and 1900 hours.”

Our feedings?  VIP toilets? And those coolers …  for years I had a repeated dream in which I entered a house brimming with priceless antiques and treasure chests full of gold coins and precious jewels.  Suddenly I would realize that all this was mine.  I have no idea what that dream meant but I felt it had come true now as I stood before a tall glass-front cooler stocked with good German beer and bottles of wine including my favorite, prosecco.

“Anne … Anne!” Rebecca was standing next to me, trying to snap me out of my trance.  “Your compatriots have the inside scoop on why we’re really here,” she said as we rejoined them at a table.

A tall guy wearing a tall fuzzy hat with a Maple leaf said, “I got the low down from another employee last night. BMW budgeted for 500 North Americans coming to the festival.  Only a select few, like the auto journalists and the big collectors, were gonna get the VIP treatment.  But then the recession hit and only 15 of us showed up!”  We all laughed.  There was one rich guy among us, but most of us were regular middle class people for whom our cars and trips like this were a budgetary stretch.

People often assume that Minis are super expensive cars.  How much things cost is all relative, so I’ll just say that they cost about the same as a Subaru Crosstek or Legacy, a Mazda 3, or a Toyota Camry.  So you could spend a lot more on a car, or a lot less.

—

We waited for our first feeding, aka lunch, and shortly before noon the pit crews from the rack track poured in.  BMW must have reckoned it might as well feed them the good grub, too.

Pit Crew 2 Pit Crew

I wonder which bunch Dagmar found more distasteful—us rag-tag North Americans in our jeans and T-shirts and fuzzy hats, or the tatted-up mechanics?  Not exactly the high-class clientele she’d had in mind, perhaps.

We enjoyed a light lunch of fresh salmon and salads and desserts.

The BarBuffet

Then it was off to explore the festival!  Rebecca and I slipped a few beers in our swag bags.  Tacky, I know, but since the swag had included a Mini bottle opener, we figured we were obligated to field test it.

—

BMW has done its brand research.  Mini owners love to “motor,” we love good design, and we love adventure and fun. Not all of us are all of these things, but you get the picture.  There are all sorts of Mini events going on around the world all the time, like group road trips, music festivals, and art and design extravaganzas.  They’re all organized by Mini owners; Mini United is the only one sponsored, every three years, by BMW.

To give you an idea of how passionate Mini owners can be, here are some Minis with the equivalent of car tattoos showing where their owners drove from—in order—Budapest, Kiev, Moscow, and Gdynia, Poland.

Budapest Kiev Moscow Poland

These are just the Eastern Europeans; there were hundreds more from Western Europe, North Africa, Turkey, and Asia.

“This puts things in perspective,” I said as we clinked a couple of beers.  “Yes,” said Rebecca drily, “I guess our epic 200-mile drive was worth it, if you like this kind of thing.”

Accidental VIPs

Leave a reply

This is the sixth post in a series about a UK road trip that starts here.

We had arrived in Silverstone, England for the Mini United festival tired, hungry, crabby, and on a budget.  “You can sleep when you’re dead,” is one of my mottos.  Hungry could be fixed with overpriced, tasteless vendor food, but a budget was a budget, and incompatible with a long weekend of overpriced vendor food.  I was doing okay financially—obviously—since I could afford the airfare to get there.  But Rebecca worked as a carer, which is someone who cares for elderly and handicapped people in their homes.  It’s a super important and supremely underpaid job.

We crawled out of the tent and surveyed our surroundings.

Tent City Tee pees

Yes, teepees—they’re big over there.  I subtly strolled by one that was open to get a look at the interior but didn’t have the guts to take a picture. There’s a permanent platform, so you’re never going to get wet unless it’s flood-mageddon.  You rent the teepee with all the gear, which can include cots and coolers and all the bulky heavy stuff that’s a drag to store and pack if you own it.

Is this cultural appropriation?  I don’t know. Maybe they’re just triangle-shaped tents.  It’s not like these campers were dressing in rawhide and eating dried strips of deer meat and doing war dances.  At least, not that I saw.

—

We used the porta loos, which weren’t bad as far as giant storage containers of feces and urine go.  There were sinks with warm water but no showers.

I was having a hard time getting excited. But hey, it was just three days.  How bad could it be?  I didn’t want to ask Rebecca what she was thinking because it had been my fool idea to come here.

We slogged for what seemed like a mile, following the other ratty-looking campers, to get to the registration point. “Okay I’ll just say it,” I said.  “We can walk back to the tent and cook over the stove every meal, which will take forever but save us money.  Or we can buy the overpriced food at the concessions.”  I was wondering how much a beer would be.

“Yep,” Rebecca replied, stonily.  Then she turned to me with a forced but radiant smile, “Let’s just see how it goes!”

“Hmm … what a novel but healthy idea!”  I was on board.

“We can always bitch and moan later.”

“Yes, it’s a beautiful day!” I replied, and it was.  We were tromping through a farm field on a sunny, warm spring day.

We arrived at the registration point and there was a line a hundred people deep.  An employee came by and scanned our confirmations.  “Oh,” he said meaningfully, “You’re North Americans.”  I didn’t correct him, that Rebecca was not a North American, in case that was a bad thing which would cause her to be ejected.

He waved us over to a different line where no one was waiting.  This was good.  I showed the confirmation.  “Welcome!” our staff greeter said enthusiastically.  “Here’s your swag bag.”  He handed us each some nice-looking messenger-type bags emblazoned with the festival logo and stuffed with … stuff, to be revealed.  “And these are your VIP badges.”

Rebecca and I exchanged glances that said, “do we keep our mouths shut, or not?”

“Thanks for thinking we are VIPs,” I said regretfully, “But we just paid the regular admission like everyone else.” I waved my arm toward the hoi polloi waiting in the very long line.

This guy had the best job in the world, because he got to say this to people: “You are VIPs, because you–you North Americans–are our best customers.”  I didn’t feel like an uber customer, but I just smiled and nodded in order not to break the magic.

—

We made our way straight to the VIP lounge, where we sat speechless, smiling dumbly at one another, emitting the occasional giggle.  “What if it’s a mistake?” I kept asking.

“Let’s just stay in here the whole time so we don’t have to risk not being re-admitted!” was Rebecca’s idea. And that’s pretty close to what we did.

VIP Lounge