I asked my friend Jerry if he’d like to go to Sacramento with me so that I could pick up the '63 Triumph Herald. (I’d scheduled a transport with Hurst Auto Transport, but after a month they had still not assigned a carrier. I cancelled and decided to get the car myself.) Well, if we’re going that far, why not go down to L.A.?
Jerry, Paul and I left around 11:00 Monday morning and drove straight through, arriving in L.A. around 7:30 Tuesday morning. We went to my old apartment building, and my next door neighbour came out with her black lab Molly. Molly strained at the leash to greet me, and I scratched her head. She barked at my friends. What a sweet dog for remembering me! I had a brief visit with a friend in the corner house, and then we were on our way… somewhere.
We were all tired, and nobody knew where they wanted to go. I drove us down to Marina del Rey, and then up to Santa Monica. We decided we needed to find a hotel, so we checked out TravelLodge on Ocean. $169/night. Right. Let’s look elsewhere. We checked out a place across from McCabe’s, but they had no room. We ended up getting a room at the Super-8 Motel in Downey. Crappy area, but cheap. I got my own room, and the guys got a double. My shower was faulty, and I had to shower in cold water. Bummer.
We headed down to Long Beach to see Jerry’s old stomping grounds, and had breakfast at a little Greek place on 2nd. (I had kebabs.) Time to check out the MGB! We went to Huntington Beach…
The body looks good. Well, the paint does. We saw some rough welds. I saw some sheet metal that was rusted through and that had just been painted over. I (politely enough) pointed it out to Antonio, and he said he could fix it. (Why didn’t he do it right the first time?) Still the body looks great in its new paint, and it is straight and sound.
We went to Irvine to meet Jerry’s ex and son. They wanted some time to discuss things, so Paul and I made ourselves scarce for about 90 minutes. They’d gone somewhere, so I called them. We agreed that we’d meet Jerry later at the motel. In the meantime, I visited the MGB’s engine. Needs pistons, camshaft, oil pump and water pump. We were running out of time, so they’ll send a complete list of what’s to be done and how much it will cost.
Once Jerry showed up at the motel we headed back to my old home. We visited my best friend in the building, and her big yellow lab Sebastian. Did I say ‘big’? BIG! The dog is huge. He was happy to see me, and quickly made friends with my friends. Carol couldn’t go to dinner with us as planned because she gets up at four in the morning, so we went to the courtyard and chatted with my old neighbours (and some that moved in after I’d left). I went to Pam’s apartment and asked if Taz (her pomeranian) could come out to play. Taz is a sweetie. Another (new) neighbour had a seven-week-old bulldog. It sure was cute! (And so was she! 
) My Scottish neighbour Karen came over to say hello. She’s rather hot, and my friends were like, ‘Dude! Why did you leave?’
Once we said our goodbyes, we went to Ye Olde King’s Head for some fish’n’chips. Headed up to the 3rd St. Promenade, but it was deadsville. Off to Hollywood! Actually, we were all pretty beat from the long drive down and the driving around in the L.A. area. Hollywood didn’t look all that interesting, so we just went back to the motel to crash.
The shower was still faulty in the morning. They let me into another room so I could get a hot shower. We checked out the guys were hungry, so we went to a little diner by the motel for breakfast – in spite of the fact that we were on our way to lunch! They couldn’t wait. We met former co-worker Julie, and Jerry’s family, at a Mexican restaurant. I managed to get through two fish tacos, and the guys ate too. And I got caught up on some of the dope going on at my old employer.
Now, this company – or at least this division – has had a habit of spending enormous sums of money on The Latest And Greatest Systems to replace the clunky old mainframe. Each time, they end up tossing the new system and going back to the trusty mainframe. We all thought this was silly, but they kept doing it. Well, a couple of years ago they were going to start using Ascential DataStage to process our data. Oh, this is going to be so much better! :dubious: The whole department worked for about six months converting our reformat programs to DataStage. Then we were told to stop. The Indian Company (ironically named Tata) would take over. That’s when half of us were laid off. The new system was eventually installed. Guess what?
It was supposed to process zillions of lines in the blink of an eye. Instead, it took much longer than clunky old Easytrieve Plus. Not only that, but only one contributor’s data can be run at a time. Toyota or GE or one of the other big ones would take all day to process, and nothing else could run until they were done. :smack: And so now that system is being scrapped, and they’re going back to the mainframe. Incidentally, the other part of the company has been using a very robust system for years that works great. But will my old division use it? Nope. They’d rather wast millions of dollars on something that doesn’t work.
Schadenfreude can be so fun, sometimes! 
We went to Culver City to visit Martin B. Retting’s gunshop. Several pieces in my collection came from there. Paul chatted with Chris Penn, who was there to purchase a gun. Unfortunatley, Red Star is no longer across the street from the M.B. Retting’s.
Off to Hollywood! We stopped by Birnes & Sawyer, and I got some chamoises for my cameras; then to Mole Richardson where I got a couple of sandbags. Jerry knew of a place in the Valley that had the same stuff cheaper, so we went in that direction. We found the location and were about to start on our way to it, when my phone rang. Paul’s wife. She’s in hospital. Seems their second child is going to be a month early.
What to do? Paul said he couldn’t afford a flight to Bellingham, so we decided on the spot to start driving north. At 5:30 in the afternoon. After a very long drive the Monday and Tuesday, and the driving and visiting on Tuesday, and not much sleep Tuesday night, and driving all over L.A. and Orange Counties that day. Nothing to do for it though. We had to get Paul home!
Which brings me to the Herald. The whole point of the trip was, originally, to get my car. L.A. was an add-on. We drove quickly up to Sacramento, arriving before midnight. The seller agreed to wait up for us. When we got to his house, it was dark. I LVM on their answerphone. Then I called the seller’s wife’s mobile phone. Wrong address. The car was actually at ‘the ranch’. Well, it was; but they’d driven it to Sacramento Int’l Airport to save us driving 20 miles out of our way on the 80. (Seller’s wife: ‘See? I told you we should have called them!’) We hopped back onto the 80 and up to SAC. There was the car. Sounded a little rough, but it sure is cute! 
Jerry and Paul totally dug it. And now for the long drive home…
I told the guys they should go on without me, since the Herald would be extremely slow and Paul had a baby making a surprise visit. They wouldn’t hear of it. We got on the freeway and the Herald struggled up to 50 mph. (It’s supposed to make 78!) Didn’t get very far. Somewhere not far from the beginning of the causeway that was built over the swamp, the engine died. Jerry knows a thing or two about cars, and he quickly deduced that there was no fuel going through the carburettor. We had spark, we had fuel going to the carb, but no 15:1 vapour! Oh yeah, and the distributor turned freely in its mounting and the fuel filter had crud in it. (The seller did fill the tank with new gas. He’d also had the car lubed and the oil changed, and shined it up.) Mere minutes into a 900-mile trip, and I was dead in the water, so to speak. At the end of 45 minutes from the time we pulled over, the car was loaded onto a AAA flatbed truck.
We took it to a U-Haul place, but of course they were closed at that hour. We left the car there, and proceded on our baby-meeting mission. I took the first shift driving. Remember that I’d done all of the driving that day in L.A. Jerry took us out of L.A. up to Sacramento. From SAC I drove to Weed. Too far, but I knew that Paul didn’t like the curves in the Siskiyous. Jerry could have driven it (and he did offer), but I knew the road and the Jeep very well. I thought it best if I got us through. After stopping at the rest area in Weed, I crawled into the back and went to sleep. Jerry drove the rest of the way, having napped a bit while I was driving.
We go into Bellingham a little after four this afternoon. The baby was still biding his time, and Paul was going to get a shower and some stuff his wife wanted before going to the hospital.
Jerry and I will drive down to Sacramento on Saturday and pick up a car dolly on Sunday morning and tow the Herald back. We’ll get it running again once it’s here.
