Keith’s Blog: Jaguars and Pancakes

Marionberry milkshakes, pancakes and old cars are a Martin family tradition.

The Elderberry Inn is a family-owned restaurant about 50 miles from Portland, and about 25 miles from the Oregon coast. You get there on Highway 26, a scenic, curvy road that crosses the Coast Range, mountains that are really just hills with an elevation of about 1,500 feet.

At the Elderberry, they make their milkshakes the old-fashioned way, mixed in a metal canister that holds enough for two milkshakes. The canister is served alongside your milkshake.

Last Sunday, we decided it was SCM Breakfast Club Day. I took the 1971 Jaguar E-type, and my son Bradley and a friend went in the S4 Alfa Romeo Spider. (He prefers the Alfa for its upgraded Bluetooth stereo.) As Bradley’s busy senior year unfolds, there have been fewer and fewer times for us to do things together, so I seized this opportunity.

It was about 50 degrees and clear, perfect driving weather. There were snow advisories at elevation, but it was warm enough that I wasn’t worried.

Both cars fired right up. Ever since Ed Grayson at Consolidated Autoworks rebuilt the Strombergs on the Jaguar’s V12, and taught us to not pump the throttle when starting the car (there are no accelerator jets, so what’s the point?), it cranks four or five times before roaring to life, crisply and authoritatively. We pull the choke out three clicks when the car is cold and feed it back in as the water temperature comes up.

The Alfa with its “modern” Bosch fuel-injection just starts.

I drove the 53-year-old Jag, and I enjoyed watching Bradley keep pace in the 33-year-old Alfa. About five miles into the trip the Jag speedometer had gone non-op. The needle just stopped moving, so my assumption is that it is a snapped cable. I put it on the list of things for Ed to look at.

As this was our first time driving the car in chilly weather, we spent a lot of time fiddling with the temperature controls. One turns the air supply on and off, the other controls the temperature. (I’ll have Ed lubricate those as well.) A few hours into our drive we started to get a little warm air.

Both cars could have used air suspension to deal with the added weight after our generous breakfasts.

On the way home, we stopped to fill the cars with clear gas. (I try to do that whenever the cars might be sitting for a while.) We had the obligatory “I smell something. We better open the hood!” moment when I had to lock up the brakes at an intersection. But the burning rubber smell soon went away.

Our old cars had given us a four-hour escape from the ordinary. If we had gone in a modern car, we wouldn’t even have been aware we were driving. But in the classics, we were watching our gauges and hyper-aware of our surroundings, mostly distracted drivers in three-ton SUVs that whizzed past us at 80 mph.

We also made another old-car memory. In the end, the purpose of classic cars is to maximize our sensory input, taking us to a different place, both physical and emotional. And most of all, to enjoy time with family and friends. The Jag and the Alfa accomplished all of that and more for the four of us on Sunday.

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Read my previous blogs here.