Michael Stoliker's Journal

I'm now the proud owner of two Spitfires. I brought home a 1976 Spitfire offered for free on this website. Being out of work, I should probably have my head examined as I want to put this car on the road as well as my first Spit, the "Tomato". However, since the rust problems are starting to look insurmountable and there's that small problem of no title, I'll probably break this poor car up for parts.

I have to say it breaks my heart to consider this, but it was the plan all along.

On the day I went to pick up the car, with my son Kris, it was raining slowly but steadily. As we left the Lehigh Valley headed for parts south, the rain turned into a drenching downpour and I wondered if I shouldn't turn back and make the attempt another day. However, with a trailer reserved and waiting for me somewhere near Lancaster, I decided to continue on, and the rain finally broke near Reading, PA. It seemed like our luck was changing.

My son had agreed to come only if I could assure him that we would be home by 2:30, and with a two hour drive one way, and leaving by 9 AM, I was certain we would just be able to make that. As it turned out, it was not to be. My son would end up missing his appointment.

I had thought that I would save some time, and jangled nerves, by renting the tow dolly from a location near where the car waws sitting. Dragging an empty tow dolly behind you can get on your nerves quickly as it bangs loudly over every bump in the road! So I thought I was being quite clever by reserving the dolly so close to the car.

This was not to be the case and I felt like an idiot after U-haul moved the pick-up point to a gas station off Greenfield road and added an extra fifteen minutes to out trip down. I still had some margin to get my son back in time. That margin was eaten away as we pulled off the highway at Greenfield and saw a line of traffic waiting for a tow vehicle to remove a Jeep with a busted axle from the road. We sat for another 15 minutes watching our margin slip away and should have turned back then. However, being minutes from the gas station we figured we could slam the trailer on the hitch and zoom out of there making up time on the trip to the car.

Nope! Not gonna happen. The trailer had a broken lamp, and the gas station attendant had next to no tools or materials for fixing the torn wiring to the lamp. We had to wait nearly an hour while the guy stripped and twisted wires together and duct-taped them so they wouldn't come apart. As we pulled out of the gas station and followed the narrow twisty roads between the gas station and the four open lanes of route 222, we watched even more time slip away and my son got quieter and angrier.

Once we got to where the car awaited us, we found John, the owner, busy removing the driveshaft bolts, and we were able to quickly get the car prepped and turned around and pushed up on the dolly. With the car secured, we bid John goodbye and started the slog back to the Lehigh Valley.

My son's mood started to improve as the arrival time on the GPS started to tick down from 3PM towards 2:30 as I speed somewhat beyond posted speed limits (both on the road and the tow dolly). But his mood was not to last as our GPS took us right through the center of Lancaster in very heavy traffic. Not even the sighting of an Amish horse and buggy improved my sons mood now. The arrival time ticked back up to 3PM and beyond. And my son's quietness now was due to him falling asleep to the rythmic banging of the dolly over the joints in the pavement.

He slept all the way from Lancaster to Reading until I had to pull over to remove a tarp that John had secured to the bare top frame. The thin woven plastic had succumbed to the battering it had taken at the hands of the high speed winds of our highway travel. It was rapidly turning into blue confetti and showering the cars behind us.

The roadside was narrow and the trailer wheel was almost in traffic as I crawled out the passenger side door onto the steep grassy slope of the embankment. I removed the tarp as quickly as I could, acutely aware of the cars speeding by at 70 MPH just inches away from the trailer. Stuffing the tarp into the car's trunk, I ran for the relative safety of the van and waited for a big enough hole to pull the weight of the car and trailer uphill to highway speeds.

Back on the road again, my son, who had watched my side of the road antics with great interest, now slumped back into quiet anger as the GPS arrival time now sat firmly at 3:30 and refused to budge no matter how fast I drove. For the rest of the trip home, all I heard from him is "don't ever ask me to come get another one of these cars!". Also, the ominous, "You owe me for this!" I felt it to be the better part of parenthood not to remind him of what he owed me for the last 18 years as I was pretty sure that would not improve his mood.

When we finally arrived home at 3:17, my son, who had been texting furiously for the last 30 thirty minutes went off to go grab a bite and go for a walk on a nature trail with three lovely young ladies he knew from high school. I crawled under the dash of the car to chisel off the ignition lock screws by myself, as my son did not seem eager to stick around and learn something about cars, not that I can blame him!