My trip to the FCA meet in New York | Page 2 | FerrariChat

My trip to the FCA meet in New York

Discussion in 'South Central - USA (TN, MS, AL, GA)' started by Gatorrari, Sep 27, 2018.

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  1. piratepress

    piratepress Formula Junior

    May 18, 2009
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    Chip A.
    Thoroughly enjoying the story and the great photos!
     
  2. Gatorrari

    Gatorrari F1 World Champ
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    Thanks. I hope other people are reading the text and not just looking at the pretty pictures!
     
  3. Gatorrari

    Gatorrari F1 World Champ
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    Wednesday, Sept. 19: Stuffing the Ferrari was a little bit more difficult because of the stuff I'd picked up in Corning, but it all went in, though not before Oops! no. 2 appeared: I had difficulty getting the passenger-side door to latch. After a number of tries, I seemingly got the door closed, but the lock button would not go down all the way, which I would later find out meant that the door was still not completely latched. But it seemed good enough at the time, and after having breakfast at the Grand Victorian for the 5th straight day, I checked out and headed to the highway. (I should point out that on the last three nights of my stay, I shared the hotel with a large club of Harley-Davidson riders who were at least as old as I was! They wore different color shirts every day.)

    My destination today was the house of my good friend Scott in Lancaster, PA, where I would spend three nights. I first met Scott in 1985 at Boeing Helicopter near Philadelphia, when I was on loan from Grumman and he was a college student interning for the summer from nearby Widener University. We found we had some common interests, and later that year, Scott invited me to celebrate Thanksgiving with his family, a tradition that has persisted to this very day. The following year I invited Scott to accompany me to Montreal for the Canadian GP, and he accepted. Three years later, we treated his younger brother Gary to a trip to the same race as a high-school graduation present. In early 1990, I got an offer from United Airlines for 2 people to fly to London for the price of 1 on their partner British Airways, and Scott joined me for a fun week in England. Scott later got married and had three wonderful sons, the youngest of whom is now a sophomore in college. I've seen them all grow up from babies, and they all still call me "Uncle Jim"!

    Their first acquaintance with my Ferrari came in 2006, when Scott, his wife and their two older sons were part of a church group that traveled down to Louisiana to do some relief work in the year after Hurricane Katrina. I persuaded them to make their overnight stop in Chattanooga, and I drove up there in the 328 to meet them. Not only that, but I got one of the locals to show up at the motel with his 308. When the group (mostly teenagers) peeled out of the van after an 11-hour trip, they expected to see one red Ferrari but got two! They spent the next 20 minutes taking selfies of one another around the two red cars; then the other fellow left and we all headed to a Fazoli's up the road (there's that name again!) for a well-deserved meal. I spent the night at the same motel and we all enjoyed a late-evening dip in the pool. Scott and his sons all got short rides in the 328, but that left a few more family members that I wanted to offer the same to, and I always wondered about the sanity of driving the car all the way to Pennsylvania. Well, this year the FCA kind of solved that problem! (Scott himself actually got more rides in the car in other years, since he occasionally made business trips to Atlanta.)

    I left Sayre heading east on I-86, passing over some still-swollen creeks, and picked up I-81 southbound in Binghamton. I stopped just across the state line at a PA Welcome Center that was new since I had last traveled 81. (The old Welcome Center had been some 40+ miles down the road!) I discovered that the passenger door had become partially unlatched, so I called Ron and he told me how to get the lock button to go down once I got the door visually closed as I had done in Sayre. After several tries, it worked, and Ron suggested that I should avoid opening the door again. Fortunately, everything either on the passenger seat or on the floor could be reached and fit through the window. For lunch I had a roast beef sandwich at a Roy Rogers on the PA Turnpike northeast extension, and then decided, since I was making very good time, to make a pit stop. My route was taking me down to the mainline turnpike only about 15 minutes from Algar Ferrari in Bryn Mawr, so I headed that way to see if their service department could possibly come up with a solution for this latest Oops! This involved a pleasant ride on US-30 through Villanova University. I had been to Algar in the past but wouldn't have recognized it now, since it's been completely rebuilt in the style of FoA and other dealers. They felt that the problem was less with the door latch and more with the door sagging, and suggested I lift the door as I closed it, which didn't solve the problem completely but did alleviate it somewhat. And they didn't charge me anything!

    I returned to the PA Turnpike and headed west to the US-222 exit which took me down to Lancaster. About halfway there I began getting the "agricultural" smells common in the Pennsylvania Dutch country, where horses and buggies sometimes outnumber cars. (Oddly, in my two full days there, I would not pass a single buggy, which is highly unusual.) When I arrived around 3:30, oldest son Josh (who had ridden in the car as a 13-year-old) tried out the driver's seat before heading back to his Philadelphia apartment. I had stopped at a coin-op car wash before driving to the house, so the car looked at least presentable. After Scott arrived home, wife Nancy served up some delicious leftovers, and it was nice to have a home-cooked meal after a week on the road.
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  4. Gatorrari

    Gatorrari F1 World Champ
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    Thursday, Sept. 20: This was a quiet day, with nothing planned. Scott's brother Gary, who had never seen the 328, was visiting from Ohio, and I agreed to take him to lunch in the car, which turned out to be a Jersey Mike's across town. By using the techniques I had learned, I got the passenger door closed and latched, and we had a good ride. I don't think that anyone in Scott's family is truly a "car guy", but they all seemed to appreciate the Ferrari. Middle son Zach and his wife Erin, who lived elsewhere in Lancaster, came over for dinner and they also got to sit in the driver's seat; Zach had been 11 when he had last done so in Chattanooga!

    Friday, Sept. 21: This day was the real reason I had come to southern PA in the first place: another annual meet! This time the group was the Road Map Collectors Association (RMCA), and the location was the Antique Automobile Club of America (AACA) Museum in Hershey, not far from Chocolate World and Hersheypark. This was about a 50-minute drive from Lancaster up the PA-283 freeway and a two-lane. The RMCA meet was mainly a vendor's affair, with about 25 vendor tables in the museum's upper rotunda; some people mainly were selling oil-company maps, the kind that used to be given out for free (anyone remember that?) but which largely disappeared after the 1973 oil embargo. Others specialized in official state maps, the kind usually given out at Welcome Centers. They even had a table with free contemporary official maps for anyone to take. Later in the day the RMCA had seminars and a banquet planned, but I wasn't staying around for that; in fact I only stayed until lunchtime. I'm not a big-time collector of old maps - most of my collection is current-day - but I did find enough to buy to make the trip worthwhile. This was the first year the RMCA was meeting in Hershey, and it sounded like it would become the regular location for their annual meet.

    Of course, attending the RMCA meet also meant paying museum admission, and even though I had toured the museum (with Scott and family) back in 2011, I figured I'd take a quick walkaround, and found a few things to photograph. Of course, as the Ferris Bueller displays will attest to, the "Ferrari" is one of the two imitation 250GTs built for the movie, so I still had the only real Ferrari on museum property! They have no fewer than 3 of the 51 Tuckers ever built, and an unusually petite Harley-Davidson motorcycle. The basement level is a separate bus museum (but included in the same admission). And out front is the Hershey Kissmobile, proof that Oscar Mayer doesn't have a monopoly on vehicles of this type! The AACA Museum is a Smithsonian Affiliate (like the Southern Museum in Kennesaw) and is worth a trip if you're ever in the area.

    After leaving, I drove past Hersheypark (closed on a late September weekday) and passed through the famous intersection of Chocolate Avenue and Cocoa Avenue (with their famous streetlights) on my way to lunch at Red Robin. While I was in Hershey, Scott and Nancy had actually driven to York to pick up a new Mazda CX-5 SUV which was to largely replace their old Honda Pilot, which would be retained for use when the Mazda wasn't quite big enough. I made it home before they did, but for a change the Ferrari wasn't the center of attention!
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  5. Gatorrari

    Gatorrari F1 World Champ
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    I forgot to mention: I committed Oops no. 3 on my way home from Hershey. Lancaster has some old one-lane underpasses, and in queuing up for one, I slightly scraped the right side of the car on the stone wall. Fortunately, the damage was confined to the arch over the right rear wheel and only to the paint, so it could have been worse. The fact is that, again, no one seemed to notice on the rest of the trip home.
     
  6. zoomie35

    zoomie35 Rookie

    Oct 11, 2007
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    Great pics and a great story! It appears retirement agrees with you. See you at the Petit.
     
  7. Gatorrari

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    Saturday, Sept. 22: This was the first day of my real trip home, which meant stuffing the Ferrari again. By now I had accumulated enough stuff (including the maps from Hershey) that I needed to find more places. I realized that if I left the roof on the car I could put some shopping bags behind the two seats. (I had left the roof on nearly the whole trip anyway, just taking it off for the "pleasure drive" the preceding Monday.) For most of the trip, I ventilated the cockpit by using the air conditioner while also leaving both windows open, and that worked quite well. If it was cool enough, I'd just turn off the compressor and leave the fan running.

    There was one piece of unfinished business: giving youngest son Caleb a ride. He had been too young for the Chattanooga trip in '06 so he had never seen the car. He had decided to stay at school over the weekend to study and not come home, but as it happened, the school (Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, southwest of Harrisburg) had declared Saturday to be a Family Day, so Scott and Nancy decided to drive up there to bring Caleb some accumulated supplies that he had been requesting. And they wanted him to see the new family hauler, so they loaded everything in the back of the Mazda and I followed them to the campus, which was about an hour away. The first part of the route duplicated my trip to Hershey the day before, but it was all good because it's the same route I was going to take anyway. So Caleb got to see two cars that were new to him! We all helped bring the stuff to his dorm room, which was a triple; large enough for its three inhabitants, but just barely. I hadn't been in a dorm room for some time, but honestly, aside from adapting the rooms to today's electronics requirements, the room looked very much like the one I had occupied in Gainesville in 1972!

    We decided to go to Five Guys about 15 minutes away, and close to my intended route, for lunch. To give Caleb his ride, I took everything out of the passenger area (and behind the seats) and put them in the back of the Mazda, now that Caleb's supplies had been delivered. I took the roof off and stowed it behind the seats, since as the tallest member of the family, it would have been a tight fit for him. Can't open the door? No problem - he simply climbed over the door and slid down into the passenger seat. (Caleb may be the best natural athlete I've ever seen - every sport he's tried he's excelled at, and his current passion is: ultimate frisbee! As a freshman, he became a starter for Messiah's team.) So I again followed the Mazda to the restaurant.

    Caleb enjoyed the ride and we all enjoyed our burgers. When done, I put the roof back on, transferred my stuff from the Mazda back into the passenger area (and behind the seats) and said my goodbyes; Caleb would ride back to campus in the new family Mazda. I was soon on I-81 heading south, and again the traffic was quite light. I estimated my arrival in Christiansburg, VA for around 6 PM, but I spent nearly a half hour in the Virginia Welcome Center watching scattered thunderstorms to the south on weather radar. Eventually I convinced myself that they would not be an issue and pressed on regardless. I did indeed encounter scattered showers from Winchester southward, but they were very scattered, mostly quite light, and with no thunder (or hail). I made it to the Microtel Inn in Christiansburg, a place I had stayed at before, around 6:30, not bad considering my late start. I ate dinner at Red Lobster, where the food was fine but the service was dreadfully slow, and I committed Oops! no. 4, which I did not discover until the next day. I wondered why no one was discussing that day's Virginia Tech game until I saw the score and saw that they had been the victim of a monumental upset. So I didn't mention it, either.
     
  8. Gatorrari

    Gatorrari F1 World Champ
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    Sunday, Sept. 23: For the last day of the trip the weather was supposed to be fine, though it had rained overnight and I needed to towel off the car cover before removing it. After driving for about an hour, I got off the road to fill up at a Shell station only to discover - no Visa card! (Oops! no. 4) I deduced that I must have left it at the Red Lobster, since I know I didn't need it after that. I paid for that fillup with cash (which I had enough of) but realized that I could use my credit union ATM card as a debit card, so that's what I did the rest of the day. Timing was such that I had lunch at the same Fazoli's in Knoxville that I had eaten at 10 days earlier, even parking in the same space; the only difference being that this time I'd have to pay for the meal myself.

    In Chattanooga I encountered the only traffic jam of the entire trip, and it was due to the dimbulbs at the Georgia DoT, who don't seem to realize that on Sunday afternoon, people are trying to return home from weekend trips! They had a right lane closed passing the Georgia Welcome Center (which I did not stop at), doing minor work which it looked like, to me, could easily have been done during the week or even (with suitable lighting) at night. Thus they caused a 5-mile backup that went back into Tennessee! I also knew that the continuing weekend repaving in Cobb would cause major backups, so when I saw that the new express lane before Wade Green Road was open, I took it. Only the last two miles of my trip would have been ruined by the repaving, but for a little over a dollar, I was able to avoid it completely, and I backed into my driveway at about 4:30. End of trip and end of thread, unless I think of something I missed.

    BTW, I called the Red Lobster in Christiansburg on Monday, and they indeed had my credit card, which they have since returned to me. Now that my long story is done, comments are welcome. Oh, for anyone whose interest in the FCA meet I might have aroused, next year's will be in Scottsdale, AZ, but 2020's will be in Mont Tremblant, Quebec, which is a spectacular track in a spectacular site. (FCA apparently holds the meet in Canada once a decade.)
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  9. Gatorrari

    Gatorrari F1 World Champ
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    Thank you, Mark. Would you have taken a similar trip in your old Porsche Turbo?
     
  10. Lotus91

    Lotus91 Formula Junior

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    good stuff Jimmy
     
  11. andy308

    andy308 Formula 3

    Jan 16, 2005
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    Great trip Jim, thanks for sharing. Some new glasses might be in order so you don't keep running into things! Sorry, I could not help it. LOL
     
  12. bball16

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    It’s funny, I had the Shell Pleasure Drive banner on my windshield and after the drive we were on our way back to the hotel at a pretty good pace when my 458 started making some crazy noises. My heart was in my mouth as I pulled over worrying about what it was. Until I got out and realized the, somewhat high speeds we were driving, ripped the sticker off the windshield. I was incredibly reilieved, peeled it off and got back to the fun. I agree with you 100% in that the whole event was very well planned and really alot of fun. My friends and I are already planning our trip to Scottsdale next year.
     
  13. Gatorrari

    Gatorrari F1 World Champ
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    I guess I'm a more sedate freeway driver than you are, and my sticker is still in place. I'll leave it on a while longer before removing it and perhaps hang it on the wall of my garage. My speed philosophy on the freeway is speed limit +9 MPH, never any higher, in any car I'm driving, which is probably why I've never gotten a speeding ticket in 48 years of driving!
     
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  14. bball16

    bball16 F1 Rookie
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    Understand. We kind of got caught up in the excitement of the group drive back. Those roads were so inviting.
     
  15. ATLdoghouse

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    Jim,

    Awesome story and pictures. Very glad the trip went well.

    Cody
     
  16. gt1995

    gt1995 Formula Junior

    Sep 3, 2011
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    The same thing happened to me on the way back from the Shell Pleasure Drive. I actually headed home from there and right as I crossed the border into PA I heard the awful wind buffering noise and though the roof was coming apart on my 360 Spider in the middle of a rain storm. It blew off completely a couple of seconds later and then I figured out what had happened!
     
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  17. 4re308

    4re308 F1 Rookie

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    Jim great reporting as usual, really enjoy reading your posts.
     
  18. Scaledetails

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    Supercool post, love it, thanks Jim.
     

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