Listers,
This was sent to me by John Quilter up in Brisbane, Ca
Enjoy,
Rick
Travels With Homer: Next Time I'll Bring an Extension Cord
By STEVE POTTER
The New York Times
It started with the car, a 1957 Morris Minor four-seat convertible with a
downcast ovoid grille and headlights perched on top of the fenders that
gave it a sad-funny face like the clown Emmett Kelly Sr. Perhaps it was the
Minor's cute demeanor that 15 years or so ago persuaded a restaurateur in
Charlotte, N.C., that it would make a good salad bar.
I could more easily shoo away a lost and hungry puppy than dismiss the
little car, the British grandfather of the chic new Mini. A friend had
recovered it from a field, where it was left after the restaurant closed.
Now, three years later - after a restoration from the floor (which was
mostly gone) to the roof (which needed all new fabric over the metal bows)
and everything in between - it was our car. "Let's drive it home," I said
to my wife, Kathy. "It'll be fun. We can get to know the car a little."
Home was Freehold, N.J., 600 miles from Charlotte. And while the Minor
appeared to be in like-new condition cosmetically and mechanically, with a
37-horsepower engine, it still was no speed demon. My laptop road-atlas
software suggested we could make it home in 10 hours, including rest stops,
by maintaining a 70 mile-an-hour cruising speed, but the Morris would be
roadkill on the Interstate.
"We'll take back roads," I suggested. "Drive through small towns. We won't
take any road that wasn't built before the car, or sleep in any building
that wasn't standing in 1957." We would eat in cafes and little roadside
restaurants, the kind of places that travelers ate in 45 years ago. It
would be a chance to revisit interstate travel before it became Interstate
travel.
A few clicks on my mapping software (I wanted to revisit the 50's, not
relive them) specifying a preference for local roads and strict avoidance
of Interstates and toll roads, and we had a route. With the addition of
Asheville, N.C., to our itinerary and a stop to see friends in Sweet Briar,
Va., the mileage totaled more than 900 and the driving time nearly 24
hours.
We flew to Charlotte on a Sunday morning and took delivery of the Minor the
next evening. Our plan was to leave midday Tuesday and head west to
Asheville for a brief stop at the historic Biltmore Estate, the
19th-century Vanderbilt mansion, before checking in at the Grove Park Inn
Resort and Spa, a 90-year-old stone hotel overlooking the Pisgah Mountains
in the Appalachian chain.
The next day we would shadow the Appalachians northeast, cruise for a while
on the Blue Ridge Parkway and stay Wednesday night in Roanoke, Va. Thursday
we would make the short trip up to Sweet Briar and visit our friends for a
couple of hours before continuing on to Rockville, Md., for the night with
other friends. The day after that we would drive through eastern
Pennsylvania, spend the night in a Victorian bed-and-breakfast and then
drive through New Hope and Princeton, N.J., on Saturday morning to be home
by early afternoon.
Our schedule was documented in a 60-page notebook, generated by the mapping
program before we left home. It listed starting and finishing times for
each day and every turn, gas stop and meal along the way.
What could I have been thinking? Almost nothing went according to plan,
which turned out not to be so bad - our misadventures let us see places and
meet people we wouldn't have otherwise.
Things began to go awry as soon as we picked up the car. The generator
light on the dashboard refused to go out, indicating that the battery was
not being recharged. (British cars of this era are notorious for their
electrical problems.) Opening the hood and rapping on the voltage regulator
extinguished the light, but only temporarily.
Still, given the minimal electrical needs of a car without power anything,
we should have been able to drive quite a way on a well-charged battery. So
we left Charlotte with the yellow light blazing ominously, a battery
charger stuffed in the trunk and plans to recharge the battery overnight.
TO THE RESCUE Ornamental-concrete workers lend a hand near Asheville, N.C.
Just outside Asheville, the battery went completely dead. The spark plugs
stopped sparking and we coasted across two lanes of traffic into a
convenience store, where three good Samaritans, ornamental-concrete
workers, agreed to take me to a nearby auto parts store and wait for me
while I bought the biggest battery in the place. It was twice the power of
the original, and physically longer and wider than the car's engine.
The Minor started right up and if we had gone straight to our inn, we would
have been delayed only about an hour. But I had located a repair shop 30
miles away that specialized in old English cars, and wanted to get this
problem fixed once and for all. So we drove there.
Improbably located, down a country lane outside Hendersonville, was the
British Connection, a place full of old MG's, Austin Healys, Minis and
such. Bennett French, the owner, worked on the Minor for several hours,
changing the ancient generator and trying to adapt a pickup truck voltage
regulator, but to no avail. It was now 8:30 p.m., and we were fresh out of
ideas. Mr. French said that in the morning he would order a proper
regulator from a supplier on the West Coast. With air service, we could
have it Thursday morning.
As we pulled out of his shop that day, Mr. French said, "If you don't use
the headlights or the windshield wipers, and you park on hills so you can
push-start the car, you should be able to drive all day, or maybe more, on
one battery."
Installing the new voltage regulator meant we had essentially lost a day
and a half. Two full days and we were farther from home than when we had
started. I began to understand what the Eagles were singing about in "Hotel
California" ("You can check out any time you like, but you can never
leave.")
"I'm naming this car Homer," my wife said. "Because I'm sure that he'll get
us home. Eventually." O.K., I decided, let's throw away the schedule.
Having made that decision, I could now enjoy the drive. Our route was still
good, taking us through some of the most picturesque scenery on the East
Coast. At 45 to 50 miles an hour, the car was very pleasant to drive, and
we had plenty of time to look at the landscape. We just weren't going to
get to our overnight stops at the end of each day.
A LONG, STRANGE TRIP The 1957 Morris Minor pauses near Boone, N.C.,
three days and several repairs into a journey from Charlotte, N.C., to
Freehold, N.J.
Instead, we arrived in Boone, N.C., early on Thursday evening after a drive
that took us creeping over Grandfather Mountain in second gear and then
down a dirt road, where we came face to face with a prison work crew and
found the battery too flat to crank the starter. (A push-start got the car
going and we limped to a gas station and bought a third battery.)
Boone had many motels, some of which looked as if they might have predated
our car, but none looked like the right place to stay. We reached the far
end of town when my wife spotted the Lovill House Inn, a B-and-B run by
Scott Peecook, a retired Navy officer, and his wife, Anne. They had a room
left and Mr. Peecook knew a mechanic who could charge up all three of our
batteries in the morning - the charger we brought along didn't really work.
Being off our schedule also meant that instead of arriving at Sweet Briar
midmorning and having only an hour or two with our friends, we arrived just
in time at their house for dinner and spent a relaxing evening before
retiring to their guest room. By now we had written off our plan to drive
through Pennsylvania, and I plotted a route on my laptop that would take us
home more directly, albeit with a five-mile dash along Route I-95's 12-lane
bridge over the Delaware Bay. (Come to think of it, how did people cross
the bay before the Interstate?)
But before that, we lost another day to bad weather. Saturday afternoon,
after a rural crossing of the Potomac River on a wire-guided ferry at
White's Ferry, we made it to the home of friends in Rockville, Md. We awoke
the next morning to a driving rain that lasted most of the day. Even if we
had the use of headlights and wipers, I don't think I would have ventured
out in that weather: too many gaps between the convertible top and the
windows. We had a nice visit with our friends.
LUCKY BREAK A wrong turn in New Jersey leads to the Olympia Dairy Bar.
We departed on the final leg Monday morning, two days after we were
supposed to be home. Even on the uphill side of the Delaware Memorial
Bridge, the Minor maintained 55 miles an hour. We exited just before the
toll barrier for the New Jersey Turnpike - and missed our turn off the
road. It was the first navigational error of the trip, but even this was
serendipitous. Before we discovered our error, we passed the Olympia Dairy
Bar, a roadside stand that looked right out of the 50's. It was.
The Olympia is still operated by the same family that built it in 1956, the
year before our Minor rolled off the assembly line, and it was
architecturally unchanged from when it opened. It was a bit early for
lunch, but we had left Rockville shortly before dawn and before breakfast.
A Philly cheese steak and a chocolate malt quelled my hunger pangs and was
a perfect coda for a trip through time. We retraced our path a couple of
miles and were soon wending our way through New Jersey on Route 537, which
becomes Main Street in the small town where we live, Freehold.
What might be said of driving a recently-restored-but-untested vintage
English convertible on a 900-mile trip is that once is fine, but after you
are reminded how far cars have come in the past half-century, why would you
want to live with the shortcomings of an elderly auto? I can't answer that,
except to say that my wife and I are already thinking about a back-road
drive to Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
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