Thread: My bride and I..............

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........have an agreement. She does all of the guilt and most of the worry.........that way I'm freed up to be the irresponsible one.

However, time has imposed some limits on just how much irresponsibility one can endure. The spirit is willing, the body............well, you know the rest. I was reminded of this (yet again) the past weekend. 30+ years ago I bought a Beck 550 replica, the second one he sold to a paying customer. His operation was in Upland, Ca. at the time, and I was in the Seattle area.........roughly 1200 miles apart. So, I borrowed my then bil's Courier pickup, a friends boat trailer, and off I drove. I was pretty excited to get the car and ended up driving straight through.........something just under 24 hours. The drive down was pretty uneventful..........well, except for the drunk driving the wrong way on I5 at just after 2:00 am. But got there just the same. Of course Chuck didn't have everything ready as he'd promised, so I ended up hanging around his shop for a few hours as he finished some things. By that time I was getting a tad tired, so he offered me the couch he had in his aircraft hangar at a nearby airfield. I tried to crash there, but only got a couple hours sleep before submitting to the itch to get back on the road home.

The trip back went pretty well, the trailer with car lashed down tracked fine, load stayed secure. But somewhere on the Oregon side of the Siskiyou's it started to rain............hard! It was pitch black out, wipers going as fast as they could, and my eyelids weighing about 100 pounds each. Pulled into a rest stop and gave into the sand man. Yes, a six foot tall guy can actually sleep crosswise in the cab of a Courier. Not comfortably mind you, but it's doable (for a guy in his early 30s anyway) After daylight appeared the rest of the trip home was routine. Tadah!!

Flash forward those 30ish years and a similar story unfolds. I've had the itch for a '32 Ford sedan for awhile (to go with the pile of chassis parts lounging in the garage) and managed to make a deal on one down in the Bay Area, hey, only about 800 miles this time. Well, the above mentioned bride (the one responsible for most of the worry) wasn't too excited about my doing another banzai run to pick up junk (she doesn't mind the junk, she's given up on that, it's the banzai part she didn't appreciate). According to Google maps it was supposed to be a 12 hr 20 min trip.............they don't allow for towing a trailer and doing the mandated 55 mph limit in California (stupid law, but cost me a small fortune ignoring it a few years ago when I got the Fairlane in Sacto), so I knew it would take a bit longer. Upshot is, she insisted she come along, and that we be sensible about it (where's the FUN in THAT!!!). Turns out that with the first home game of the season in Eugene we lost about an hour in Oregon stop and go traffic (on I5 no less.........dumb ass Ducks!) So we ended up spending the night a couple hours short of our destination the first day. Once we got to the gal's house there was a little more drama as trailer backing room wasn't quite as adequate as she had said (what's new right?), but the three of us (yet another reason the bride was right.......again) got the body loaded in the trailer with a little ingenuity involving some 4x4s and three dollies. All loaded and ready to go we hit the road, did about a 12 hour day (including the 4 hours of loading time) and spent the night in Medford. The next day was a pretty ho hum jaunt home. Nowadays the truck is bigger and nicer, the trailer more appropriate, and the pace............somewhat more measured.

As much as we'd like to still be 19 in our minds, the ol' bod just doesn't always cooperate....................but that doesn't stop us from playing the game the best we can does it?