A huge Thanks! to Mike Falcone for organizing and hosting a wonderful Meet in Newport this past week!
Our first-time Meet attendees, along with Club veterans had plenty of activities to enjoy - Monday's narrated Trolley Tour of historic Newport and its 'Cottages' followed by a tour of The Breakers - 70 room summer estate of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Tuesday's tour of the expansive Fort Adams, followed by a cruise to Beavertail State Park, on a beautiful sunny day. And Wednesday's Car Show in the parking lot of the Newport Car Museum - unfortunately dampened by persistent heavy drizzle and rain, but indoors offered a beautifully presented collection, the layout and computer-generated lighting of which is seldom seen. Many of us tested our skills on the driving simulators - all I can say is that it's a good thing we drive our Letter Cars better than we drove our race cars on those simulators! Check it out at www.newportcarmuseum.org and on Facebook. And the food quality at our host hotel was great - far better than your typical hotel restaurant. Our Hospitality Room was always open, and our preferred meeting room when the rain was falling on our cars out in the parking lot. I hope all our first time attendees had a great time, and will reach out to us with questions on their Letter Cars, either on our list server, or individually.
I saw Dave Dumais' email comment about the flooded ramp to the bridge by our hotel. John Begian and I headed out shortly before Dave and Diane, and the heavens let loose as we started driving on the Newport Bridge, so we just beat that flooding, but it sure didn't make our drive any less challenging in John's G and my F. Heading westbound to Michigan for John, and Illinois for me, we experienced on and off sometimes heavy rain all the way through central Pennsylvania. My car developed an engine 'miss' as we had headed toward Newport from Cooperstown on Sunday, so John looked in the distributor after our late lunch yesterday in western PA - reset the points and tightened a couple connections. In the middle of doing this, a brief but heavy rain hit, so down went our hoods and trunk lids, up went our windows, as we sat in our cars and waited - we would have been better dressed in swimming trunks. Thanks to John's magic touch, the F ran like new again, all the way back home - 19 hours door-to-door including stops - rolled into my driveway at 12:30 last night - a fun 2,000+ mile round trip that I would repeat next week.
Noel Hastalis
F Coupe
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