On The Road Again

Paul and I recently made our annual trek to OBX, the outer banks of North Carolina. The photo on the right was a stallion following along behind his mares and a foal on the beach one day we were there. We didn't see too many wild horses this year.

This is our third year at OBX since buying a timeshare in Kitty Hawk on eBay, sight unseen. Not only had we never seen the condo, neither Paul nor I had ever been to OBX.

During the week of the auction I did some serious Internet research but it was still a leap of faith when I kept increasing my bid in those last minutes of the auction and then won. It turned out to be a great buy. The condo is beautiful and in a great spot. We start looking forward to it every March when we've had just about enough winter.

This year we left a couple days early and extended our vacation. On the way to OBX we stopped in Ocean City, Maryland, for what we expected would be a quiet couple days in an oceanfront hotel. Here's the view from our balcony. This is peaceful but it tells you nothing about what was going on in front of the hotel.

We had no idea that the week we picked to stop in Ocean City was the same week that the 20th Annual Cruisin' Ocean City was happening. On the way down we kept noticing classic cars on the road. We figured there was probably a car show somewhere south but didn't know we were heading right into it.

Right into it is right. The town was full of hot rods, custom cars and street machines of every vintage, make, model, color and style. They drove up and down the main drag called Coastal Highway. And anywhere there was a parking lot along the street you would see cars parked with some people sitting in canvas chairs and others wandering from car to car looking under the hoods.

Plus there were people lined up on the sidewalks along the street watching the impromptu parade.

The show is open to cars built in 1979 or earlier. The formal registration is limited to 3,000 but a total of about 7,000 cars show up and the weekend draws 100,000 people. It's based at the local Convention Center but spills everywhere in town.

Paul was in his glory. A 'gearhead' in his teens and twenties when he built, rebuilt, raced and wrecked a few cars, it was a trip down memory lane for him. There's a '90 convertible Corvette in the garage now. And as much as I appreciate wandering around looking, we have been to many car shows over the years, this was definitely sensory overload.

Coastal Highway runs past all the hotels, motels, restaurants, t-shirt shops and other places that want your money. There are traffic lights every block which gave the hot rods and street machines just enough time to go through a couple gears and leave some rubber before they had to shut it down for the next light.

The noise was incredible but it was fun to watch. I much prefer to watch the cars moving rather than sitting in a parking lot with the hoods up. Yeah, that's a lot of chrome but how fast does it go? The smell of testosterone was everywhere or maybe it was just exhaust. I felt like I was in a scene from American Graffiti.

Here are a few of the many photos I took. Whether you care about cars or not, you have to admit that the work and money that goes into these machines is pretty awesome.

So it wasn't the quiet few days at the beach we were expecting but it was fun. We heard there is a Bike Week in Ocean City in September when about 10,000 bikes and 200,000 people show up. We'll skip that. I've been to Laconia, and Paul goes every year.

Maybe we'll make Ocean City Cruisin' an annual event.