Got a call from “Hot Rod Ron” last week, telling me that a local brewery, Tree House Brewing and where his son works as a production engineer, was having a Cars and Coffee this morning and asked if I could make it. Why not?
So I set out on the eastern end of coast-to-coast US RT 20 this morning to hook up. RT 20 isn’t an interstate highway, and it was established decades before the Interstates, but it is only a double 2-lane road going through cities and villages with the usual lights here and there. As I passed the ramps for I-90, which parallels RT 20 coast to coast, I was suddenly surrounded by six or eight “Tuner Cars”, all Subarus, a bunch of tricked out WRXs and even a tricked out Forester, all lowered, wide tires, with rappy exhaust and running a tad too rich from being “chipped”. They were all headed west on RT 20, so I assumed they were all going to the same Cars and Coffee as I was (Tree House Brewing is right on RT 20 about fifteen miles from my house).
There is a lot of road construction happening on RT 20 for about five miles starting just west of the I-90 connection, as they try to change a very dangerous, winding stretch set out in the 1910’s into something straighter and much safer than ever. Because of that, there are literally thousands of orange and white traffic barrels guiding you down from a double to a single lane, barely as wide as a Semi-Trailer, with nothing between opposing lanes but 4’ tall orange and white flappy plastic vanes to keep cars apart from head on collisions. It’s pretty scary.
So there I was, literally in the middle of a big bunch of manic “Tuners” on a single-lane, who all accelerated when they hit the construction zone. What’cha gonna do? All I could do was stomp on the gas and keep up! I was doing that just fine and marveling that the exhaust noise of the guy in front of me was actually louder than my blown-out Berg headers, when I glanced to the side and saw a sign:
”Heavy Construction Zone
Speed Limit 35MPH”
I glanced at the speedo and after doing the KPH to MPH conversion in my head I realized that we were doing close to 70mph!!!!!! By that time, I figured that (a.) I had become part of the “Tuner” group, (b.) if we got pulled over for speeding I could say I didn’t know any of them and just got intimidated with pressure from the car behind me and (c.) there were probably too many of us for a cop to stop, anyway. And, of course, my last card to play has always been;
“Gee, Officer - This thing is just an old VW Beetle underneath and it simply can’t go that fast!”
I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to play that. By now, I was really getting into it, definitely keeping up and then some, while staying between the barrels and center vanes, and looking forward to pulling in to the Tree House parking lot and hanging out with a bunch of (much younger by decades) Tuner folks, kind of like the bunch of similar Hippies on the “Group W Bench”
Hey! We all just blasted through several miles of a 35mph construction zone at 70+!
A few short minutes later, and ignoring the threat of jail time, we got to the entrance of the brewery and I just assumed that they were all going there, too, but no……. They all kept screaming along RT 20, heading West, over the next hill and gone, but the last car in their warp-speed caravan gave me a thumbs up out the window as he blasted past.
When I told this story to Hot Rod Ron and his son, Luke, they told me that there was a big Subaru track day at the Palmer, MA race track today, so that’s where they were probably headed, farther out on RT 20 and then north into the woods near Hot Rod Ron’s home.
Bummer.
Probably my only chance to be part of a Tuner crowd, and I went to a brewery instead of a track.
☹️
photos of the event. I parked near the BMWs. I was the only 356 there.
