Invisible Show this Saturday!

Once again, we’re having our second invisible show of the season this Saturday, August 20. Again, this is one you will want to miss! It’s going to be a parking lot that will slowly fill with cars you just saw at the grocery store hours earlier! It will all happen just as the mall opens! Incredible! This is hard to do with perfection, but we do it! There is no fooling us when we pull off this magic. This will be more exciting than fruit!

Okay, okay, let me explain. For those of you from Fresno, there is no car show on Saturday, August 20. Capisce? (This means, “Understand?” in Italian…sort of.)

Isn’t this amazing?

It’s “Car Week” in Monterey, CA and so we have a lot of people already headed there, this means we don’t have enough of what we need to make a decent show. For those of you who are new, we’ve been taking this day off as a tradition to give our volunteers a nice weekend of planned time off.

Often people use last Saturday’s show as their departure day and point for the drive down the coast. That drive alone is a spectacular adventure, never mind the car show. Most try to arrive on Wednesday for a busy five days.

If you’ve never driven down the Pacific coast, do that trip going south, not north. North sucks. Why? Because all the cool stuff is off to the right, the beach, the sights, the interesting stops. It’s hard to cross traffic in some places, so you end up not stopping. There was a time when we did group runs down for Car Week and it was a lot of fun. We’ve often thought of formalizing it, but we just don’t have the volunteers.

One year, we left E@RTC on Saturday, drove down the coast, hit the shows, then continued down to Santa Barbara, then down to San Diego, then up I5 home. It was an unforgettable adventure!

In my opinion, the best time to drive the Pacific Coast is during storm season in October or November, if you like a little excitement. The tourists are gone and the weather, if you like wind and rain is spectacular. It clears up by the time you get to the dunes, but that first stretch is a wild drive.

Still, the hardest rain I’ve ever encountered in my life was in Depot Bay in November. The waves were crashing over highway 101! To this day, I’ve never experienced rain like that. I was in a parking lot and could barely see the building! The only way I could get more water on me was if I was swimming.

Don’t ever attempt it on a motorcycle during that time of year. If you think you can withstand that kind of rain and wind, go to the fire department on drill day, sit on your motorcycle and have them hit you with two firehoses simultaneously. If you remain on your bike, you’re qualified. Otherwise no.

I’ve never experienced anything like it, but what makes it survivable is that the coast is built for it, so it’s not like you have to stop and move someone’s porch. By the time you’re down in Eureka, it’s all over and once you’re in Avenue of the Giants, it’s complete and total silence.

Have an adventure! Don’t get all cranky about never getting out. Make a memory! See you all on the 27th, assuming it doesn’t rain.