The Memorable Detour

A dear old friend of mine recently retired and was returning to our old stomping ground of Amherst Massachusetts. We have another Amherst friend in common, a fellow named John Robison. John runs JE Robison Services in Springfield MA, a top-flight restoration and repair shop that specializes in Rolls Royce, Bentley, and Land Rover, but works on just about everything. John is also the author of The New York Times best-seller Look Me In The Eye: My Life With Asberger’s. As fellow writers and car guys, John and I have been in touch on social media for years but hadn’t actually seen each other since the late 1970s. The one and only time that all three of us (me, John, and my just-retired friend Aaron) hung out together was 49 years ago, an episode during which all three of us rode on John’s Honda 305 “Dream,” engaged in age-inappropriate activities, and ended the evening by pulling the bike over a rickety log footbridge and sleeping in the woods in Granby. But that’s another story. A few texts between the three of us yielded a plan: I’d drive out to John’s shop in Springfield, we’d do the car-guy thing, then we’d meet Aaron at John’s house in Amherst for dinner.

Since the drive out to Springfield is a straight shot out the Mass Pike, going right past the exit I take for the warehouse in Monson where I store five cars, obviously the thing to do was combine the social events with a visit to the warehouse to swap one of the cars, as keeping them exercised and the gas fresh is always good. My red E9 lives permanently at my house in Newton; I never leave it in Monson. And the Lotus is in the middle of a suspension rebuild. So the two candidates for swapping were Louie the ’72 2002tii, and Sharkie the ’79 Euro 635CSi. 90-degree temperatures and high humidity were forecast, so the fact that both of these cars are air-conditioned was good. I’d brought Sharkie back from Monson and floated it for sale a few weeks ago. It didn’t really get much traction, so whether or not to put it back in storage meant confronting the question of whether I was going to move from “floating” it to actually listing it on an auction site like eBay or BaT. And whether Louie stayed in Newton was a function of whether or not I thought I’d be working on it. Since bringing it home from storage, I’d solved a brake fluid loss problem and fixed a hard-starting issue. Maybe I’d given it enough attention for now.

Regarding which car to bring back from Monson, the M Coupe seemed like the logical candidate. I knew that its inspection sticker had expired, but I needed to deal with the fact that the SRS light was on before it would pass.

I decided that the thing to do was give the candidate cars at the house a spin around town. So I jumped in Sharkie, and was immediately reminded of two things. The first was that, as I’ve said, I love the way this car looks and how it inhales interstate, but it’s a bit ponderous around town (the three-inches-bigger-than-stock BBS RC090 wheels certainly make the steering feel less than snappy). The drive out the Mass Pike to Springfield / Amherst is mostly highway, so well-aligned with Sharkie’s strengths, but the second thing was that the car’s air conditioning seemed a little off. I measured the vent temperature and found it to be around 50 degrees. This combined with the car’s black interior made it not Sharkie’s day. I made a note to hook up the manifold gauge set and check the system pressure.

I love you buddy. Just less so today.

I drove Louie the 2002tii around the neighborhood next. Louie has the Clardy a/c system that I retrofitted a few years back (you can find a nine-part blog about entire installation on bmw2002faq.com). It was bangin’ cold with 40-degree vent temps, and that Clardy blower fan that hangs down into the passenger footwell moves a lot of air, but I was quickly reminded that the remaining maintenance issue with Louie is that the car has become thunky and klunky with age, exacerbated by the updated-and-firm suspension (H&R progressive-rate springs and the Bilstein HD shocks and struts, Suspension Techniques sway bars) I installed a few years back. I keep meaning to put it up on the mid-rise lift and look closely at the rear bushings, but the Lotus is both physically and metaphorically squatting there while I pull apart and reassemble its front end for the fourth time. That work should end in a few weeks and free up the lift. So Louie should stay.

That’s the stuff.

As part of these machinations, I needed to pull Rene—the red E9—out of the garage and into the driveway. Since it was there, I decided to take it for a spin to get an a/c comparison. After all, the E9, Sharkie, and Louie share a special bond in that they’re the three cars in which I did from-scratch a/c installations, the E9 being the very first 25 years ago with several repairs and upgrades since. The car’s vent temps were down at 42 degrees, almost as good as Louie’s.

But more than that, the E9 just clicked with me. Everything about it was in the automotive Goldilocks zone. Somehow, after driving Louie and Sharkie, Rene clearly won the race she wasn’t even entered in. Really, there’s zero surprise in this. It’s my favorite car, the one that’ll still be there when the creditors seize the property. It’s drop-dead gorgeous and fairly well-sorted. This was the car I wanted to shoot out to Amherst in and back. The fact that a trip to Monson was taken off the table (I don’t “swap” Rene for anything) was suddenly irrelevant. I didn’t care. It even made a different kind of sense. Any time I do anything in Monson, it takes hours longer than I’d planned, and I emerge soaked in sweat. I was meeting old friends for dinner. I didn’t want to smell like I’d been emptying DampRid containers. It made sense not to try to squeeze Monson into this trip.

So Rene and I headed west for 100 minutes on the Mass Pike. Despite my having tinted the windows, installed a shut-off valve on the heater box so it isn’t always blasting heat into the passenger compartment, and installed the biggest parallel-flow condenser that would fit and a fan powerful enough to suck a shih tzu off the sidewalk into the nose, the E9’s a/c was at its limit in the late afternoon high heat and humidity. 42-degree vent temps are great, but the blower motor in the original Behr evaporator assembly is anemic (as Michael Miller said decades ago, “like a squirrel blowing on a snow cone”), and I could feel the heat wafting off the black dashboard baking in the sun through the un-tinted front windshield. I know that someone on the E9 forum with a mechanical engineering background is looking into whether a more powerful fan motor can be shoehorned into the evaporator box, but all I could do was move my seat two notches toward the steering wheel to get closer to the cold, and wonder if there was anything, you know, Hackey, that I could do to get the system to move more air.

But then I arrived. John’s shop is very impressive, with six buildings hosting a dizzying range of activity. I saw late-model Rolls Royces and Bentleys being serviced, vintage Land Rovers in the middle of six-figure restorations, a new burled walnut dash awaiting installation into one vintage Rolls, and the Rube Goldberg-like power convertible top of another being simplified with a microprocessor and linear translators. In the corner of one building, a Maserati Bora sat without its interior, and a Lamborghini Countach was awaiting closure of a brokered sale. It all made me fell like the amateur I am, but I perked up when I heard one of the techs yell “Who owns that rad E9?”

Amidst a sea of Rollers, Bents, and Italian exotics, Rene more than held her own. (photo John Robison)

We then drove to John’s house in Amherst where we met his wife and our mutual old friend Aaron. Over pizza on the deck, we talked about old days in Amherst. Then, when the moment was right, I asked if either of them remembered the last time the three of us were together. Aaron certainly did, even recalling details I had forgotten, and correcting me that we didn’t actually sleep in the woods but squatted in some cabin. “Yeah,” eventually said John, “I slept in that place a lot.” They both laughed when I recalled us guiding the motorcycle over the narrow rickety log bridge that crossed a creek.

We said our goodbyes and parted company. I certainly knew the way home, but fired up Waze anyway for the traffic and speed trap warnings. For decades I used to drive the northern route in and out of Amherst, taking the curvy Rt. 202 north of Quabbin reservoir to the highway-but-not-an-interstate Rt. 2, but these days, since Newton is just two miles from the Mass Pike, the southern route clearly makes more sense. I was surprised that Waze directed me to take the northern route, but I’ve learned to trust it, or rather to distrust it at your peril. When I headed out to Monson in June, I overruled Waze’s telling me to take an exit, only to come over the rise into a sea of brake lights and hear Waze’s cheery update that I’d be in traffic for 45 minutes.

So, out Rt. 202 I went. I hadn’t gone this way since filming the clown shoe video with Magnus Walker three years ago (article here, video here). I’m not the nighttime corner-carver I once was, but on that clear night and with zero traffic, it was a gift to drive my favorite car on this road so steeped in personal history.

Then, something bizarre happened. I stopped for fuel at the convenience store just before the intersection with Rt. 2, pulled back out and prepared to take the right turn onto the Rt. 2 eastbound entrance ramp as I’d done probably hundreds of times, and saw it blocked with sawhorses and traffic cones.

Wait, what? Did they move the ramp? I drove a quarter of a mile in each direction. I saw the open westbound ramp, but this was the only eastbound one, and it was blocked. No explanation, no detour sign. Just blocked.

Rt. 202 at this point is coincident with Rt 2A which roughly parallels Rt. 2. The thing to do seemed to be to head east on 2A until there was another chance to get on the highway. There appeared to be a line of cars doing the same thing. They all took the next right. I assumed that one of them knew what I was doing, so I followed them. Unfortunately, this was one of those “don’t follow me, I’m lost too” moments (I actually have that album by Pearl Harbour And The Explosions). I relied on Waze (did I mention that I trust it?) to find my way onto Rt. 2. After a myriad of turns, I realized that this paragon of navigation intelligence had directed me back to the same closed entrance ramp that it knew nothing of.

I had the bright idea that I’d go west on Rt. 2 and turn around at the next exit to get on the eastbound side. When I got up on the highway, I remembered that, this far west, it’s not divided. I carefully checked both directions, then hung a U-turn. Finally. I was eastbound. Good. It was getting late and I was tired.

Then I saw a small sign. Not a big flashing yellow arrow on the back of a truck. Just a small stand-up sign. It said “Road closed ahead.” I slowed way down. Two cars came flying up behind me, flashing and honking at my caution. I pulled into the breakdown lane. They roared past me and over a rise. Shortly after, I heard brakes squeal. I came over the rise and saw not only their brake lights but the same impromptu cone-and-sawhorse barricade forcing cars to take the exit, and a sign saying “Road work.” I did not see any actual “road work,” just the barricade and the sign. Again, not a peep from Waze. My assumption was that the traffic density was so light that it hadn’t detected any disruption. I had no choice but to take the exit.

I got back on Rt. 2A east and this time stayed on it. It was about ten miles until it intersected Rt. 2 again. By that point, there was quite a line of confused and irate drivers. Finally, after a delay of almost 45 minutes, I got back on Rt. 2. Grateful for the open road, I goosed it. I had maybe ten seconds of bliss until Waze tried to redeem itself by barking “Police ahead!” At least that prognosis turned out to be accurate.

The unexpected detour of the drive home got me thinking. Sometimes it’s the things that are unforeseen, maybe even a little jarring, that are the most memorable. My wife Maire Anne and I still talk about the time that, very early in our relationship, I got my mother’s Chevette stuck in the mud. This time, I was alone in the car, but Rene and I have been together for only two years less than my 40-year marriage to Maire Anne. We’re familiar, almost intimate. I can easily imagine, on my next unexpected detour during a road trip in the car, saying to Rene “Gosh, I hope this isn’t like that closed entrance ramp on Rt. 2. Remember that? Wasn’t that bizarre?”

And hey, at least we didn’t wind up in the woods with me trying to shepherd her over a rickety log bridge.

Rene, safe at home

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