A grand tourer (Italian: gran turismo) (GT) is a high-performance luxury automobile designed for long-distance driving. The most common format is a two-door coupé with either a two-seat or a 2+2 arrangement.
Thus, for this grand tour of the USA, I present...a Mazda RX-8 Grand Touring:
Technically four seats. In reality, the rear seats are more useful to store suitcases and electronics (of which more later), because the trunk is packed. I ditched a box of clothes at home because I was out of space. I don't actually know what was in it - it's entirely possible that I've left myself with nothing to wear in Boston save an Ali G costume.
Now about those electronics
Documentation for this trip comes at you courtesy of three digital cameras, one GPS receiver, one laptop, a window mount, a big external hard drive, and one poor Woot inverter that was probably never meant to drive so many devices. One of these is particularly notable:
The camera itself isn't very interesting. It's a 4-megapixel Canon Powershot S45, it cost me $40 on Ebay, and given its external appearance, it's something of a miracle that it actually takes pictures (but it does, beautifully!). The contraption attached to the top is far better:
Each of these is a popsicle stick with the cap of a 2mL Eppendorf tube epoxied onto it. Rubber-banding one of these onto the top of the camera lets me keep the shutter held down for hours at a time - and by setting the camera to continuous-drive mode, it'll keep taking pictures (every 3s or so) for hours. Combine this with the window mount, and you get a setup for a time-lapse movie of the drive across the country.
Descriptions of the rest of the stuff (and results!) to come later.
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