Rode down with the gang at Sports Car Restoration. Took 14 hours to get there, we left at 4:30am. We brought the e30 323 Euro, the e30 325 with m50 swap, the 69 ///M2 (2002 with s14 swap), and a 1969 Bavaria.

I rode down with Matt in the m50 swapped car. Full Bilstein and spring setup (don't know which springs) plus an e36 rack upgrade. E30 M3 seats, which made for a supremely comfortable ride. I've known the guys at SCR for a couple years now, but only recently have spent enough time there to really get to know them, and I have to say they really are a bunch of legitimately cool guys. The craft work that goes on in this shop is second to none.

Very mellow ride down, just good conversation and company. Took a lot of pics on the way down, and that continued the whole weekend. We got to the hotel early in the evening, and the parking lot was already full of cool cars. Several 02s, a few e28s, a couple e30s... all very cool.

Hung out Friday night, drank a few beers. Saturday morning we slept in, blew off the drive event before the show. It might have been cool to drive around in a couple miles of vintage BMW traffic, but we had just driven 700+ miles in vintage cars, we didn't have anything to prove to anyone. Made it to the Vineyard fairly early and parked. Spent the next several hours walking around taking pictures of as much of the show as I could. Lot of neat old cars down there. The pics will tell that story.

Saturday night we had tickets to some CCA dinner thing, but nobody felt like rushing out to it. Hung out in the hotel for a couple hours, I transfered all the day's pictures, took a nap, showered. Made it out to Winston-Salem and had some dinner at some local place. Decent looking city, but we only got to see a few blocks.

Next morning we woke up to find most of our party didn't feel like waiting for us and they left for Waffle House for breakfast. It worked out well because I needed to bust out a speedy valve adjustment on the Bavaria. !4 hours at 4krpm had left it with a couple ticky valves. 20 minutes later and we were good to go. We teamed up with an e28 M5 owned by a guy in Rhode Island that had been staying in the same hotel, and the e28 ACS S5 owned by a guy in CT. I'm avoiding names intentionally. The owner of the M5 mentioned there was a route that would take us an extra hour or two of travel time, but it was said to be some of the best windy road to be found anywhere. It sounded like a no-brainer, so after teaming up with the Waffle House traitors again at McDolnard's for fuel at the gas station in the same building, we hit the road.

After a little but of street driving we arrived at the Blue Ridge Parkway. It began as a fairly mellow backroad, tree lined and green. After driving this road for a little bit we were suddenly in the kind of on-camber corners commonly found in magazines or movies. I was riding in the Bavaria at this point, taking pictures. The owner of the car was driving, and excitedly yelled for me to take pictures. I was too excitedly grasping at the jesus handle to comply. The Bav is a little squirly under hard braking, and doesn't have a lot of power to power out of corners, so we quickly lost the rest of the cars in the party. A few miles up the road we caught up to them again, and we soon stopped for fuel. Everyone was pretty amped up about that section of windy road, I myself made the comment "that was awesome, totally worth coming this way!" . The response to that was "What are you talking about, we've got another 85 miles of that to go!". My joy at hearing that was only outweighed by my desire to drive the Bav. The owner happily complied, and we set off again.

Let it just be said, that the Blue Ridge Parkway is not to be missed. There's an elevation change of approximately 3000 feet, and every single square inch of is stunningly beautiful. We didn't hit any of the scenic vewpoints as a group, but the owner of the Bav and I pulled off in one for about 30 seconds to grab some quick pics. It took us a good while to catch up to the group again at that point, but we had a very nice drive doing it. We didn't do the full Blue Ridge Parkway as it would have taken us too long and too far from our route home. I fully plan on driving the whole length of it this summer/fall. It's such an amazing road that I'd be willing to drive several hundred miles to get there just to drive it.

The rest of the trip back was as unremarkable as the trip down, in the sense that nothing went wrong. We stopped for dinner, a couple fuel and bathroom breaks. I got pulled over for having a taillight out on the Bav while I was driving it, but was let go with not even a verbal warning. I have to say the entire trip was so excellent due not to anything heart stoppingly amazing, but by how cool it was the entire time. Very relaxed, nothing rushed. Never once did anybody have to be the cool guy doing drive-bys on the highway at 120+ mph, it was basically traffic speeds the entire ride down and back, very responsible driving. Nobody had to be yelled at for pulling stupid driving stunts, and we never had any problems with other traffic on the road. We got some good thumbs-up and waves (see the pics of the two different dark blue New Beetles full of girls waving).

I get the impression that the vast majority of the people going to the event had a different experience than we did. I can see them going on the drive Saturday morning, and going to the CCA dinner that night, and putting the car back in the garage until the next event or perfect driving day, whereas we were just there to hang out and have a good weekend. Not on anyone else's schedule or timeline, we got to do things at our leisure and at our own pace.

We got back into town around 12:30am, unpacked the travel cars, packed up our stuff and headed for home. The next day was Memorial Day, day off. The whole of the next week I was still on a high from the trip. It was exactly the way road trips are meant to go (in my mind) and I would jump at the chance to take a road trip with these guys again.

Now, on to the pics:

http://s300.photobucket.com/albums/nn40/binjammin2/Vintage%20at%20the%20Vineyard/?albumview=slideshow