Well, I predicted a month ago that on the day I had to bring my car in for the safety inspection it would be raining, and sure enough, woke up this morning and the rain was coming down in buckets. Reluctantly rolled the car out of the driveway and into the pouring rain and loaded it on the U-Haul trailer. With the addition of some 8 ft. 2 x 8s, the car went up the trailer without a hitch (pun intended
). I felt bad that the car's maiden voyage out of the driveway was in a down pour, but it had to get wet sometime right? All I can say is without the tonneau cover, the car would have been a fishbowl.
On the drive over to the inspection station people were beeping and giving me thumbs up the whole way there. The either liked the car or thought I was an idiot for towing it with an open trailer during torrential rain.
I arrived at the station a little before my scheduled appointment and unloaded the car and they brought it right in. I was hoping to hang out and watch the inspection, but the inspector had other ideas. They threw me out of the garage and told me to come back in an hour or so. Wanting to stay in their good graces, I did as I was told.
Since the weather was so bad, I didn't bother leaving the inspection station and just sat in the U-Haul truck watching the rain. After a little more than an hour, the inspector raised the garage doors and gave me a wave.
Needing no encouragement, I jumped from the truck and ran through the rain across the parking lot and into the garage. Once I got in, I heard the magical words "It passed, no problems at all."
I shook his hand and thanked him profusely. What a relief.
The guys in the inspection station were very nice, very interested in the car and very accomodating. They even offered to let me leave the car in the garage until the rain stopped, but who knew when that was going to be. So I waited a little while hoping the rain would subside (never really did) and chatted with the inspectors for a while. Eventually, I just decided to load it up and bring her home (I did have to go to work at some point today). (Just for the record, the rain stopped 5 minutes after I put the car back in the garage and toweled it off- could have predicted that too).
Bob Putnam, you will be especially interested to hear what one of the inspectors said about the car: "This is one of the nicest and best constructed kit cars that we've seen come through here in a long time." You guys at ERA really do a great job.
All in all, it was a very good day (rain notwithstanding). And the best news of all is that they gave me the paperwork I need to go down and get my title. If I can figure out a way to get down to the main DMV office , I can be driving by the weekend.
