We are not quite Indiana Jones when it comes to our search for the Holy Grail at car shows or on the road, but there are certainly elusive vehicles that we seek out as Holy Grail rides, albeit without the high body count and dangerous situations found in the Indy movies.
A Holy Grail vehicle is anything we do not see very often, if at all, at shows or on the road.
Another fundamental difference is our Holy Grail program can actually fall into two categories, unlike the search in the movie.
Our first category is the unusual vehicle at a car show and we search for these babies at every one of them. We track them down as soon as we spot them at shows to avoid missing the owner and his or her story.
The second category is the Holy Grail vehicles we spot on the road during the car show season. Sidebar here: our pattern for chasing down rare vintage vehicles cars on the road is more effective than an occasion many years ago in the 70s when Jerry and I (we are identical twins and both write virtually all MSCC material for those who do not know us) spotted very hot twin female hitchhikers headed the other way on one of the busiest streets in Calgary Alberta Canada.
Unfortunately , I was unable to get turned around in time to pick them up in my smallish Datsun truck and thus it was a story with an unhappy ending for us. The twin babes were too attractive to be on the road for very long and some other lucky (probably non-twin) driver got there before we could share ID twin stories in the small truck with the two lookalike hotties.
However, we have enjoyed better luck chasing down unusual cars on the street because the cars are easy to spot and we will likely see most of them again if they live in our small city-that is an easy search for the automotive Holy Grail.
We are more challenged when we visit bigger cities and spot a rare vehicle on a busy road-and almost impossibly challenged when we see the old rides headed the other way on a busy freeway. Any attempt to turn around on a busy highway would put us much closer to an Indy Jones level of adventure and we are not typically willing to amp things up to that level.
Sometimes the gods of good fortune have provided a convenient exit ramp to allow us to turn around and head the other way. We have occasionally used these opportunities to chase down the owners, depending upon how fast they went by us headed the other way.
Luckily enough, most of the unusual Holy Grail vehicles are driven in a leisurely fashion by their owners, sometimes because of their age and sometimes because the owners enjoys their time behind enough to want to make the occasion last longer on the road.
We enjoy a distinct advantage in the Holy Grail search department over Indy Jones under these ideal conditions.
We are in the early stages of the 2014 car season and we are very eager to see what this year’s assortment of Holy Grail rides we will find at shows and on the road.
Stay tuned for more details about our successful 2014 searches in future MSCC stories.
Jim Sutherland
