Wednesday, February 28, 2007

How It All Began


Our long road to the La Carrera began about 1994 when I rented the La Carrera Panamericana by Pink Floyd. I bought the movie and showed it to Tom and we were hooked. I think the 2 Mexican blondes in the movie also got us interested. Whenever we got together for a couple beers during the winter the movie somehow was played. We always talked about how we should do the la Carrera and how we should do it some day. Tom had a couple 544 Volvos in college and they are a neat car and Volvo is also dependable so we decided if we were going to do this it would be in a Volvo.Our good friend Dale Andrews found a 1958 Volvo 444 on E Bay in Florida in 2004 so Tom bid on it and won. We left on a Thursday night with Tom's brother in law Burt to get the car in Inverness Fl. we got to Florida on Friday morning thanks to Burt driving all night rented a trailer at a U-Haul while waiting the employees were being questioned by the police for something unlawful or maybe just some bad judgement. We got the trailer and went to get the car which was just a short distance away. We loaded it up and started to head back to Michigan. We drove to Georgia and spent the night there and for dinner we went to Hooters. Burt told the young ladies in there he had just celebrated 50 years of marriage so they brought him upin front of the whole place and sang to him Burt stood up on a chair and was dancing with the girls 75 years old and acting like a kid. Tom and I thought us being race car guys we would get all the attention but Burt got it all. The next day we headed back to Michigan and by 1.30 am Sunday we were home. We stored the car till winter when Tom was moving into his new house with a garage that we could work on the car in.