Learning how to make the most of a day

Saturday 4/18/2015

Saturday morning at the totally unreasonable time of 5 AM, I woke up to do some more hot rodding (in theory). What really actually happened was I woke up at 5 AM, made sure I was wearing all of the proper clothes required of me by society, and blearily made my way over to the other hotel to meet up with Jeff and Armon, my two die-hard Mustang buddies. From there I blearily followed them to a donut shop somewhere in the vicinity of Huntington Beach, where I blearily parked and blearily answered questions about my car. Once day dawned (finally), I woke myself up a bit and was able to really look around at where I was.

Clearly I am not enough of a morning person to take a good picture at 5:30 AM.

Donut Derelicts, as I mentioned in my previous post, is this giant informal cruise-in that has been happening for years now. It started as just a few “car guys” gathering at the local donut shop for breakfast and has now, in true California fashion, evolved into a full-blown meetup complete with around a hundred awesome classic rods. I saw just about every variety of classic there that’s available in this world – rat rods, hot rods, slammed rods on bags, giant trucks, custom builds, crazy cars with entirely the wrong drivetrain in them, sports cars and stock cars and racers. I grabbed a couple of donuts and warmed them up on my radiator (for which someone made fun of me for some reason), then wandered around for a couple of hours just looking at all of the cars. Unfortunately I forgot to take a lot of pictures (early morning and all that), so you'll just have to trust me that there were some seriously cool cars there.

One of several rows of cars. Donut shop was in the very back right of the pic there.

A Jag with a distinctly not-Jag drivetrain.

It was an awesome little meet! I still struggle to identify cars outside of Mustangs just because I haven’t seen a whole lot of them. So I made a point to figure out what everything was and to ballpark the years based on styling cues. Figured I’d test myself later (I didn’t). One day I’ll get better at this thing.

Anyways, after everyone cleared out around 9 AM, we decided to head to the beach! After all, what’s California – especially SoCal – without a little beach action? I wish we could have stayed longer but we had a ton of plans for the day. So after a couple of hours of wonderful sun and sand, we headed back inland to Knott’s Berry Farm.

I may have borrowed this picture... but this is exactly what it looked like! Widest beach I've ever seen in my life.

Can I just say that Knott’s Berry Farm is a very misleading name? This place is definitely NOT a berry farm or anything remotely resembling one. It is an amusement park and quite a good one at that. Apparently what happened was that it was originally a restaurant that served fried chicken that was so incredibly delicious that people would stand in line for hours waiting for a table. Well the restaurant owners thought that maybe their waiting guests would want some entertainment, so they built some exhibits. And then they built some rollercoasters. And then somehow this thing turned into a full-blown amusement park. And the restaurant is still there and it still commands a pretty good wait on most days. Now if that is not a ridiculously American story I don’t know what is.

The roller coasters were awesome - though one wooden coaster did probably make me a good candidate for a chiropractor - and the chicken was totally delicious! Biggest home cooking meal I’ve had in a really long time and I was glad for it. I’m not a very good Southerner despite being born and raised in NC, but I am always down for some good soul cooking and man can I pack it away when it’s put in front of me.

Suitably stuffed, we headed back to the hotel for some relaxation. It seemed like days had passed since Donut Derelicts despite it being that morning. But Sunday was the big day – Fabulous Fords Forever at Knott’s Deceptive Berry Farm! I of course had not cleaned the road grime off of Jane at all but I figured I could do it early in the morning before the show started (wrong). But more on that later in the next post… Kelly signing out!