Best Laid Plans

I don’t know about you, but I’m big into planning. Whether it’s working around the house, restoring a racecar or going to a race, I like to have a game plan. The problem is, I seem to always be overly optimistic as to how long any given task may take. On any given weekend, I may plan to tear down a motor, rebuild a Hewland, organize my tools, install sprinklers in my front and back yards and spend some quality time with the family. In the end, I’m usually just tired and pissed off that I didn’t make my “plan.” Ain’t it great to be “Type A”?

So, I suppose that it shouldn’t have come as any great shock to me, that when Ed McDonough and I set out to cover all the events associated with this year’s Monterey Historics that we would be pushing the edge of the scheduling envelope a bit. Each day we’d launch out the door at 6:00 AM and wouldn’t step foot back into the hotel until well after midnight. For the dyed-in-the-wool car junky, going to Monterey is not unlike dropping a heroin addict in a Tibetian mountaintop poppy field – Too much to do, too little time. Throughout the course of the weekend, we did four days at the track (you gotta be there on setup day, right?), the Concours Italiano, the RM auction, the Brooks auction, the Christie’s auction, the Blackhawk Collection display, a couple of parties and, of course, Pebble Beach. We might have been alright if we hadn’t tried to throw Pebble Beach into the mix.