What? No, not like the “Goat ride” the young pledges of the college fraternity get taken on as an initiation thing and I am not advocating taking your local hole digging field rat on an antique car ride either. “Goferide” This is the one word my wonder-dog, “Banjo” reacts to then she immediately sprints to the driver’s door of my 53 F100 farm truck or the Model A roadster we keep at the farm. She then anxiously waits to jump in and go! “Go for a ride!”. She doesn’t realize there are more cars than those that she can goferide in. Some amazing cars from the collector car world is available to Banjo. All I have to do is get them out and say the magic word.

Banjo was the best birthday present I ever received. Since we have a wonderful farm now, Theresa gave me a Border Collie puppy two years ago for my 50th birthday. Since I play 5 string banjo I thought Banjo was a cool name especially since the black cat with white paws we inherited at the Farm was already took the name “Whitewall”.

When I say “Goferide?” to Banjo, she knows that she will soon ride somewhere with me and is excited about doing it! When riding, she sits up proudly in the front seat enjoying the wind, the scenery and mostly just the experience. Wouldn’t it be great if our wives, kids and friends got that excited about going for a ride with us in our collector car or hot rod? My wife does, so don’t think I’m complaining. (Check back to Great Race posts.) But wouldn’t it be great if WE got a little more excited,…no.. A LOT MORE EXCITED about getting our own cars out and driving them?!? No more trailer queens or Garage Queens. Let’s Drive Em! Some of us have many more cars than we can drive but we need to make it a point to NOT drive modern. Get that collector car, hot rod or truck out instead of the boring old Tahoe or mini van. You should know that “we can’t get the smiles unless we do the miles!”

Of course I have an ulterior motive for encouraging all of us to drive our toys more! Sounds self serving and it is! Sure I would like to see more tires worn out from use than dry rotting from old age. But that’s not my selfish ulterior motive at all! Let me explain. When we drive our toys, how many people turn their noses up at us or holler at us to get that old jalopy off the road? Not too many! Mostly, we all get all thumbs up and huge smiles because the American people love old cars n hot rods! We (you, me, banjo and the cars) make them smile. They either want one, are planning to get one, or we help them remember something very pleasant in their past. Either All of those positive thoughts that the viewing citizen has when they see our cars has to be good for us. Think about it! When they see our toys on the road, they might take one step closer to jumping in and buying one which helps us all. Even if they don’t buy a vehicle, they might buy a magazine, watch one of those great TV car shows, surf the internet, maybe visit a discussion board and dream and maybe even most importantly they might become AN advocate! Do you know what advocates are? Advocates believe in something and are super duper voters, yes voters, voters with attitudes!

You see our collector cars, hot rods and specialty vehicles could very easily come under legislative attack by overzealous bureaucrats or politicians thinking they are solving the ozone crisis, skyrocketing oil prices or some safety issue. Advocates make noise…the politicians listen when enough advocates speak up. The more of the public we touch with a positive thought about our way of life with collector cars n hot rods the better. When one of those politicians does something silly like create a bill to outlaw the driving of old cars except on weekends, the advocates scream bloody murder! And that would be a good thing because they would be helping us protect our hobby, our businesses and our right to drive our wonderful vehicles in this great country! So this blog post is clearly self-serving,… but along the way, I think if we get our toys out and “goferide”, we might just be enhancing our freedom of the Sunday Drive! And especially just for me, why don’t you work a little harder on wearing those tires out just a little faster!

Come on… Get em out, grab the wife n kids (even your dog!) and Goferide!

From the road,

Corky