Finally...a drive in town!
Well, the snow finally melted, and I was able to start the MGA. Amazing what cleaning the battery posts will do to get an engine running!
I really love the first drive of the season! As I whipped down the country lane (well, almost country lane, what with the gravel trucks and "drunk hobgoblins" that are the neighbors racing off to the liquor store, it's more like an L.A. street!) I was surrounded by the wind, the quite clatter of the MG running patiently down the road, and the smells of the car as it strolled down the highway. There's always that faint odor of castor oil that still comes out of the old floor boards, still the original ones from the day the car left England. It's a mysterious perfume, reminding me of my grandfather's dirt-floor garage in Cleveland, still saturated with the drippings of many Packards and Chryslers that had lived there over the years. The essential "old car" smell, a smell that tells your passenger that this car has been the get-away vehicle from at least a pub brawl or two, has seen beautiful girls in their scarves and tight sweaters.
There's also the odor of wetness, the damp that all convertibles have from a night or two in summer dews from years past. Of the days that it started raining and you and that beautiful girl labored in the downpour to get the top up, both soaked to the skin before all the turnbuckles are tight and you laugh as you turn on the demist, knowing full well that what you're about to do will defeat its purpose as surely as leaving the top down...
Ah, the memories!
I am brought out of my reverie by the fact that the brake pedal is "soft" again: probably some air in the line from being towed nose in the air for thousands of miles. Oh, well, something else to do this weekend...