Cruise Night...

I actually wrote this back in 2000 when I was still driving my car a lot. I just stumbled upon it today and thought I would share it. It's a little dated, hope you get a kick out of it. It sure brought back some cool memories.

CRUISE NIGHT

The excuse was that we were going to finalize some plans for the Gene Berg Memorial National Cruise, but we really just wanted to go to the DKPIII cruise night February 6th. Rick Mortensen and I left Phoenix a little after 4:00am Saturday, February 5th. We cruised casually at around 65mph stopping at Flying J's for gas and Grandma's in Banning for breakfast. We arrived at the Berg's shop around 10:30am thanks to picking up an hour as we crossed into California.

We met Andy at the shop. Dee and Clyde would arrive a little later. Andy showed us some of the new things that he was working on. Andy was going to engrave a shift handle with the Wolfsbürg Registry logo for our raffle prize at the Copperstate show later in the month. The Bergs were donating a shifter with the custom handle for the giveaway. It really looked cool and I want one. Who doesn't? Andy also showed us another new handle in the works but that one won't be available for a while. More on that at a later date.

Dee and Clyde showed up and we waited for Steve Hollingsworth to arrive. Steve got a late start from San Jose but still managed to make it before noon a little over 5 hours driving time. Whew! We discussed the fine points of the Berg Cruise that we needed to touch on and Dee treated everyone to lunch. This is getting to be a habit.

Of course we checked out all the neat suff in the shop, including a cart full of new crank forgings. The Bergs will be in the forged crank business again shortly! Actually they still have a few of the original forgings left. After trying to wear out our welcome we headed to the hotel to check in, then went for lunch at a little Mexican food place we found a few years back.

We spent most of Saturday night in our room staring at the tube, except for dinner at Stuart Anderson's, thanks Rick for the fine food!

Sunday morning came quickly and we headed to Norms for breakfast then to the local car wash. Our cars had many miles of road grime and needed to be cleaned. My engine or transmission started to make a strange noise around this time, but I wouldn't find out what it was 'til much later. With the cars cleaned Rick decided ride with Steve for a while and we ran a few errands (put another 60-70 miles on the cars).

We were supposed to get in touch with Mike Gagen on Sunday afternoon. I called Mike and he had us meet him at Der Transaxle shop around 1:00pm. We gathered there to watch Mike finishing up the installation of new spring plates on his red car. Dave Mason was there and we BS'd for a while then checked out the new home of Ron Lummis Racing. They were now just next door. Someone had come to do some work and we wandered around in the shop for about an hour. We got to see the New Beetle drag car coming together along with Chris Bubitz's turbo race car and another Lummis drag sedan. There was a lot of neat stuff.

The DKP guys were leaving to have their business meeting and that was our cue to find something to do before going to the Dairy Queen for the Cruise night. We went for dinner then headed over to the DQ.

We got to the DQ early before most of the DKP members had arrived. Mike Gagen had instructed me to park on their side of the DQ so I would be in line with their members…. Cool! I pulled the car in then unpacked my Surgeon General stickers and began handing them our. Later I just piled a stack of them on the roof of my car and let folks grab what they wanted. Over 50 stickers went away that night. I ran into Bill May there also. I had originally met Bill on the first Gene Berg Cruise in 1996. I had brought him a copy of Progressive Refinements in return for the gifts he had already given me. Bill is a neat guy that has many years in the hobby. Dave Cormack of VW Trends was in attendance as was Mark Herbert of SSB fame.

Before long the remaining members of the DKP arrived and parked their gorgeous cars. There were even members of the DKPII in attendance. It made for a great evening with all the cool guys and great cars there. My favorite car was a Porsche 356 coupe with Flat-4 BRMs it was really nice! Before the evening was over Mark Reilly showed up with a buch of old photos. Mark is Dean Lowry's son-in-law. Rick and Marked must have jawed for an hour before everyone got tired and decided to head out. The law in the parking lot across the street kept most of us from getting carried away. There were a few that hadn't noticed the fuzz and got nabbed for their inattention. We said good-bye to all and made our way to the hotel. We would be on the road before 5:00am and it was getting late.

We rose early and made fast work of loading the cars. Rick and I said goodbye to Steve and headed for the 55 freeway. We would be home by noon. Oops! We were supposed to be home by noon. We passed a Harley rider stranded on the side of the road about 70 miles out of Phoenix and stopped to help. He had run out of gas and we had a spare gas can. Our spare gas was his and he was on his way again. As we pulled out, I was going through the gears …when I shifted into third the engine went flat and dropped a cylinder. Upon investigation we noticed a broken rocker stud. I pulled the pushrods on that cylinder and we drove home on three at a much slower pace. We now cruised at 65 instead of 80. Oh well! We still made it in by 1:30pm, but I would find out later that I had other problems beside the broken rocker studs. I would have to pull the engine and do a complete tear down.

I'm really trying to compete with Ratto for long post honors.