There is a moral to the three day trip I just took and it is to never get to complacent or laid back when traveling. The other thing I learned on this trip, or re-learned is when you make a deal for a car, figure out where it is first.
I find a guy who has a 64 C Coupe that he stripped in the late 80s to do a restoration on it. Like a lot of these cars life got hectic and the resto never got beyond the “take apart” phase. So what we have now in 2010 is a very solid C Car that is taken apart. I make a deal with the guy, he says the town he is in, which is in the great state of Maine. I was just in Maine a few weeks ago and it is not too far away from New York, so it will be an easy trip. This is the part where me not doing my homework bit me in the ass. I look at the place on the map and it is the Eastern most city in the whole US, on the Canadian Border!!!! The orange line in the map picture is the US/Canadian border.
So be and Big John are in for a long long haul. There is another car I had looked at a few years ago in Maine, a 56 Coupe with the front end taken off. I figured make it a double trip and grab that too. The guy mentioned that he had taken a few more things off the car since I last saw it. Ok, I thought. Well, he took the rear end off, among other things, but the price was right so we grabbed it too. So far so good. 1st stop down, now on to the Canadian border. I was passing through Bangor talking to my brother on the phone, he was looking at hotels for me and mentions that we should really stop in Bangor, because there is not much past there. But I was wanting to make it as close as I could to the guy’s house so I pushed on, confident that we could find a hotel. This is mistake #2. Anyone who has been to the Northeastern tip of Maine is probably laughing because in March there is NOTHING open up there, no hotels, no gas stations, no NOTHING!!!! To make a long story short we almost run out of gas and sleep in the truck, freezing our asses off, in a motel that closed down sometime in the 80s. The poor Chihuahuas were really not having a good time at this point, nor was I, only Big John seemed to be snoring away. We wake up in the morning cold and stiff, like dead people I guess and still need gas since we drove for over an hour with the gas light on the night before. This is where the GPS failed us. The closest gas station is 3 miles away, great! Well, we are in island country and if I could fly the gas station would be 3 miles away, but taking roads it is 25 miles away, on the tip of an island, and we get there and the gas station is closed. We wait there until the owner shows up, gives the funny New Yorkers a funny look, turns on the pump, and fills our tank, full service you see. So we are now on our way for stop #2. The car is great, and the guy’s place in even better, what a view. He is an architect who built his dream house on Leach Point. He even has the late Stephen Leach buried on the property, how cool is that? We scoop up the car and start heading back south when my brother calls and says a guy in CT has a stash of parts, so stop #3 is added. Our already loaded up truck is loaded up some more with a pickup truck load of 356 parts. So finally after 3 days we are home and tired. So the moral of the story is don’t rely on the GPS and when someone looking at a map is telling you to stop in Bangor, take their advice. Never a dull moment in the land of Unobtanium, plus I got to use a Maine outhouse.
—Adam
Filed under: Uncategorized
THE UNOBTANIATE 