Corvette 50th

Australian Corvette Caravan to the U.S. for the Corvette 50th.

Part 1

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By James Pierce - (Australian Corvette Captain)

I have been putting off the writing of this account of our trip out of intrepidation at the length of the document I believed it would be. I am finally sitting at the computer with good intentions of starting on it.

I had been organizing for our group of Australians to travel to the U.S. for at least 8 months.
The object of our trip was to participate in the celebrations for the 50th birthday of the Corvette. Along the way we would "do" as much Corvette related stuff as physically possible.
With a bit of advertising I had garnered together a group of 24 Aussies, 14 from South Australia, 6 from Qld, 3 from Victoria and an ex Victorian who now lives in Darwin.

Most of the South Australians had flown into Melbourne the night before our early departure from Tulla and were staying in Carlton. David Beal, John Smith and I had made arrangements to meet them for dinner and drinks. We walked up Sydney road and ended up at the Cornish Arms hotel for a meal where Bealy and John caught up with us.
After dinner we returned to their motel an I distributed the Tour shirts provided by Ted's Camera Stores and answered questions, most of which were related to the trip!
Bealy, John and myself retired to Charlie Spiteri's for our last night of Aussie sleep for a month. Charlie had also offered to drive us to Tulla as he had an early shift at Qantas anyway. George White (our Darwinian) from here on in, known as George W. joined us at Tulla at 6.30 am to catch our 9.30 flight to L.A. via Auckland.
It's not often your bags are overweight on the way out of OZ but after shuffling a few things around we finally got all the bags under the limit. This was probably due to the slab of VB I had promised Tony Feckter. After checking our bags we did some last minute shopping, had brekky and then passed through security for the wait at the gate for boarding.

Obligatory departure lounge photos and another look at the duty free and we were on the plane for our adventure.
Crossing the date line we arrived at LAX at 9.30 am on the 19th of June, the same time we left Melbourne. Queuing for, and finally clearing customs we reformed outside the terminal to catch the shuttle to the Alamo rental lot. Our group had opted for a variety of vehicles and we ended up with 7 different cars ( I had great difficulty in keeping track of how many and who was in each vehicle)
Ours was a Dodge Caravan and there were a Mitsubishi Lancer, a Buick Park Lane, A Buick Minivan, Chrysler 300 and a Nissan 4wd. The Qld couples had a matching Caravan to ours. We very quickly decorated the vehicles with

The Australian Corvette Captain, our own James Pierce, speaks to the crowd!

Australian Flags and insignias. The Park Lane looked like an Embassy car with its flags sticking out of the centre of the hood.
It was a little messy but we all made it to our first stop in LA, the Anaheim Best Western.
As motels go, this one was very ordinary.
The rest of the Best Westerns along the trip seemed to improve as we moved east. In Little Rock we thought the motel was the best we had seen so far and I related the tales of woe from LA in the bar. One of the managers was drinking with us and picked up my bar tab as compensation. You do find some nice people in the states. Anyway back to LA, I spent the afternoon collecting the communications equipment I thought we would need. A cellphone from 7/11.

I thought it was good deal- $99 with $10 of calls and 2 promotion vouchers to redeem $50 each.
We picked up a couple of Family Radio Service handy talkies to monitor the Caravan communications from the Solder Joint.

The owner is a friend of the California Caravan captain and showed us around including the installation of a CB in a 94 Vette. We also have promotional pens proclaiming "stolen from the Solder Joint"
During the day we had walked up the road to get some lunch and noticed Coast Corvette was just around the corner. What do you do? You have to drop in. I don't think anyone bought anything at that point but it sort of started a trend.
During our time in LA we saw and dropped into several businesses which weren't on our agenda. These included Custom Auto Sound (supplies modern radios to fit older classics without cutting), a business which sold mag wheels only and a motorcycle and recreational vehicle store.
For dinner we went to the restaurant next door to the motel. It is called Cuban Pete's and while the food was pretty good the Latino dance music until 3am penetrated the motel's thin walls. I won't go into the full list of complaints but on return several of the group contacted Tour Planners (our travel agent) and recommended they never send anyone to this motel, ever again!

Friday morning we had an appointment with Tom Belden at Connell Chevy.
Tom gave us a free run of the entire lot including the workshops. Most of us took the chance to order parts from Tom and Connell provided lunch for the group. I think we also cleared Connell out of Corvette watches.
David took this opportunity to present Tom with the service award which was bestowed upon him at the birthday run in May. Tom presented me with several items for the club to auction or raffle off.

There were several vehicles of interest in the yard. The workshop manager is an ex pat Aussie and drives a RHD 63 chevy sedan with a 409. There was also a '76 Torana hatchback with the black rally bonnet and two stripped Corvairs, a station wagon and a van. Bealy started drooling over a Pontiac Trans Am WS6 in the used lot. He nearly went into negotiations on the spot.
After bidding farewell to Tom our group cruised up to Corvette Mike's to view his collection of Vettes and such. Corvette Mike's is a specialized used car lot and apart from Vettes there were several Camaros and a Fuelie '57 sedan. Mike's is now an outlet for Mosler.
Mosler make a mid engined sportscar, the MT900, which is based on Corvette components. The front suspension of the current Vette is used in the rear.

The customary cutting of the 50th anniversary cake!

While we were at Connell's one of our group was told of a Donut Shop meet that was happening on the following morning. The idea is you bring down your rod, custom or classic, eat donuts, drink coffee and generally shoot the breeze while looking at the great cars. It starts at about 6 am so we had the first of many very early starts to get there. One of the cars I can remember (we looked at soooo many cars in a month!) was a Mustang GT350H Hertz "rent a racer", very rare and very collectible.
There was the great selection of Vettes, lowriders, Rat rods etc and a large contingent of bikes including classic minibikes as well.
When we finished there we negotiated our way to Bellflower and J&D Corvette. J&D are another specialist Corvette shop and have a parts outlet, mechanical and body workshops and a dedicated Corvette wrecking yard out the back.
They also have an off site fiberglass facility to reproduce Vette panels and custom parts. Most of the guys were more interested in the wrecking yard than anything else. All the forlorn Vettes, partially stripped to be reused or recycled. Don't worry, J&D know the value of every part both on and off a Vette!
I had not planned anything for the Saturday afternoon so several went off to Disneyland and other tourist destinations. I think I wanted a power nap to catch up with jet lag but I can't remember if it happened.

Saturday night was spent in Rancho Cucamonga at the Pre Departure Get Together for the South California Corvette Caravan.
For those of you reading this and don't know, the National Corvette Museum was opened in 1994 with caravans of Corvettes from all the extents of the U.S. to Bowling Green Kentucky.
The Caravan was repeated for the Museum's 5th Birthday in 1999 and we were participating in the 2003 Caravan for the 50th Birthday of the Corvette. I had volunteered as the Australian Caravan Captain and my job was to get as many Aussies as possible over there for the celebrations.

The Aussie donation... The shirt off my back!

The venue for the get together was about an hour and a quarter from our motel.
The SOCAL Captains, Hib Halverson and Paul Mariano welcomed us and introduced me to the meeting. I explained we would have liked to bring our Vettes over but there was a little thing called money stopping us.
I also asked if there were any vacant seats so the Aussies could get a ride in a vette for at least part of the Caravan. We had several volunteers approach me after the meeting ended.
The gist of the meeting was to introduce everyone who was traveling to each other and give the latest updates to the route.
There was a supper with cakes decorated with all the different Corvette logos from over the years. We dined at a local restaurant and got out of Cucamonga about 11.30. On the way back to our motel I got a call from one of the South Australians to tell me that one of the group was in hospital.

We detoured to the hospital to see how Ian Wilson was.
After much discussion most of the group returned to the motel to get some sleep as we had a very long day ahead of us. I got to bed about 2.30 and was up again at 5.30am to get to the departure point across LA.

A little aside- on the dumpster near the hospital was a sticker in both English and Spanish. It implored mothers to not dump their babies in the dumpster. Obviously there is a big enough problem for the authorities to try and do something to dissuade it from happening.

Ian had been discharged at 3am and was deemed fit enough join the Caravan. Geoff Heaven had waited at the hospital and brought him back to the motel so there were many of us who were sleep deprived and just running on adrenaline and caffeine.
We all made it out Fontana Speedway in time for the last briefing and a good look at all the cars departing from the track for Bowling Green. The weather had been overcast and cool to warm while we were in LA. This had given us a chance to acclimatise slowly to the heat we would be subject to along the route.
The Goodyear blimp was late due to low cloud but made its appearance to farewell the 180 plus vehicles and we hit the road towards Vegas for the first leg...

More to follow...

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