Final Preparations for Tour

Well, the final preparations are done and the 2014 World Auto Tour is about to depart. With the help of MIR Corp, the tour organizers, Russian and Chinese Visa applications have been completed, the Carnet for Japan is done and the shipping container for Japan is arranged. The cars have to be at the Port of Oakland April 4th for loading into the container and will ship for Yokohama April 11th. The actual shipping time to Yokohama is approximately 12 days. Our flight leaves San Francisco May 7th and arrives in Tokyo the evening of May 8th. May 9th will be spent getting the cars out of Customs.

I can’t believe it’s almost time to depart on a World Tour that has been two years in the making….the time has really gone fast. A special thanks to Sotheby’s for all their hard work in helping us pull this together…..

The 28 Plymouth is as ready as it ever will be. Luke and I just finished a couple last minute things….installed new king pins and bushing and a commercial grade fuel filter setup (see pic) with a water separator to deal with poor fuel situations. Spare parts and tools have been packed away, so we should be good to go!

Stay tuned for new updates as we get closer to departure.New Fuel Filter Setup

Great River Road Trip

This last spring Luke and I ( the Foster Farm Chicken Team) took my 1928 Plymouth that I’ll use for our upcoming 2014 World Tour on a 7500 mile “shake down” cruise from San Francisco up through N Calif, Oregon, Idaho, the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, North Dakota and on to Lake Itaska, MN ……the headwaters of the Mississippi River.

We then followed the Great River Road down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. At this point we headed NW to Amarillo TX and followed old Route #66 to Death Valley then back to SF.

It was another great back road adventure driving everything from Oregon Trail dirt roads, gravel roads, driving the tops of river levee’s and happily almost no Interstates. This is the way to see what the country is all about…..get off the Interstate, hop in an old car and experience what travel adventure is all about…….you’ll love it, I promise!!

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Part of Old Route 66…..you can see what the Interstate did to local business

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Venice, LA…..the Gulf of Mexico. We made it!!!!!

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You gotta love a good cowboy bar….a lot of stories in this place

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One of many boat ferries we took back and forth across the Mississippi…note how high the river is…lots of flooding before we got there

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Lake Itasca, MN….the headwaters of the Mississippi River….makes you wanna start singing “Ol Man River”

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One of the old Oregon Trail dirt roads….we were on this about 1 hour not really knowing where we would come out….note it is one lane and we never met a car. We ended up where we wanted to be

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Very rough road….we could only drive about 10mph. In fact it was so rough it broke the heater core inlet tube lose so we had to bypass the heater

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Entering a military test range which was supposed to be a public road…we of course were stopped, but the guards that stopped us were nice enough to lets drive through on the condition we stayed on the main road…..