Learning to sing when there's no song

Friday 4/17/2015

You know, I’ve gotten really good at singing when there’s no song. You see, I’ve had to – because when you are going a jillion miles an hour in a car with loud exhaust and no overdrive, there is a 0% chance of you getting to hear an entire song. So I’ve gotten pretty good at picking up a couple of notes and singing from there and usually I’m pretty dead on. A couple of times I’ve accidentally sang the whole song and only noticed when it suddenly switched to something else while I was still singing. But most of the time I’m pretty close. Today’s music of choice was my “JTFO” playlist – a selection of high quality jams from the 70’s-90’s. Once I sang along to Skid Row when it was actually .38 Special, but the rest of the time I had it on lock!

But that’s not what you want to hear about, probably. You want to hear about how I daringly hauled ass across the California state line and into the dreaded traffic of SoCal, zipping left and right to get to my destination safely among a sea of disinterested or clinically insane drivers. So I’ll get right to it:

I left my hotel sometime early morning and jumped back onto the interstate. This close to California I started seeing a lot of classic car traffic and affiliated vendors. And the closer to California I got, the more interesting things got. I saw a pair of RVs pulling a pair of hot rods on the side of the road – one of the hot rods had blown a tire. I saw the Roush guys and waved as I blew past them at 95 mph. And I saw a Suburban that had inexplicably flipped itself upside down on a completely empty freeway with no obstacle in sight. But other than that, mostly I just saw… a ton of sand and desert plants.

Lots of rocks.

A terribly boring welcome sign.

Sand...

More sand, but with mountains in the background.

Late morning saw me crossing a giant volcanic field. Actually pretty fascinating because you could see the cinder cone that had blown and the distribution of the lava flow / ashfall in its immediate vicinity! But that may just be the geologist in me speaking.

Oh dang check out those flowssssss

Then I headed into L.A. traffic. I’ve heard many, many horror stories about the terrible drivers of the SoCal region, but unfortunately I can’t add to them. Traffic was a little rough but not too bad, and I saw exactly zero insane drivers. Only two guys hung out of their windows to shout at me (about the car, not about my poor driving skills) and other than that it was totally uneventful! It was a nice breath of fresh air to get off the interstate and onto the nice wide boulevards of Buena Park though.

I stopped at the Knott’s Hotel, where I had reservations, and sat around for a couple of hours cooling off before dinner. I met up with the StangFix guys – about 20 die-hard Mustangers that have been meeting for this show for 13 years now – at Outback for a delicious steak. I was pretty surprised at how many people recalled my face (and, more frequently, my car) from last year’s road trip.

Dinner was quite pleasant and then… well, then I hung around and hot rodded until 1AM. When I say I was hot rodding, I mean I was mostly just driving around enjoying the warm night. There is something just truly wonderful about a warm nighttime cruise on a neverending night. But alas, the night had to end fairly early (as in midnight, not 4 AM like usual), as we had plans to go to Donut Derelicts in the morning! This informal cruise-in has been going on for years in Huntington Beach at a donut shop. More on that in the next post – just know that it was very, very early when we had to get on the road to get there. Kelly signing out.