Rusty But Trusty

Just to prove the cars all work, occasionally they actually get to do more than just run out to the shop for maintenance and smog-related work (don’t ask me what I’m currently doing to get the Beta through smog). The message came through late last week that the weather was good enough for the inaugural run of the Bernal GT100, and since the spider hasn’t been out in a while, we picked it to be the car for the day. So you might ask, why are there no pictures of the spider? Well, at 8:45am on an empty stomach, the battery (despite being disconnected) decided to fail after a bit of cranking the car over on the starter. So the Alfetta got the opportunity to step in, which was just as well since it ended up being rather cold & foggy on the early part of the run. And of course, being the scruffiest looking car I own, it fired up on the first try!

Luckily I’d had the foresight to fill it up last week, and since I hadn’t cleaned up the fuses or grounds, which has been causing some brown-outs with headlights, radio, and radar detector on, I cracked open the windows and listened to Alfa music instead. After grabbing some breakfast at our favorite coffee shop near Kim’s old place, we headed up to the Diamond Heights Safeway for the meet-up. Yup, the Bernal GT 100 started in Diamond Heights – I’m guessing because of the convenience of parking, coffee, and pastries all in one place.

Early in the drive, we had some pretty fantastic effects with the sunlight filtering through the redwoods and the fog, resulting in some amazing, ethereal shots, like this, which looks like a 914 gone to heaven. The weather, combined with the ever-present cyclists on Peninsula roads, makes me feel lucky I didn’t acquire any extra hood ornaments while crawling along the road.

Here we are pulling in to our lunch stop in Pescadero. The market there provided a nice lunch – if you haven’t been lately, they’ve now devoted half the store to a brick pizza oven, sandwich counter and some table space and bar seating. Check out how that truck towers over the Alfetta, which is not a terribly small car… and yet only comes up to the bottom of his wheel wells. Well, I’m sure he’s got a trailer-full of horses to pull or something, so I won’t question his motives in purchasing such a large vehicle.

The nicest shots involving the Alfetta came out while we were running Stage Road (for us, the second time since we didn’t follow the directions properly). It’s quite a bouncy, tight and lightly-trafficked road that’s great when you have a car with compliant suspension. I’ve run this in the spider once, and good times did not ensue when you consider the low-hanging oil pan guard that car has.

Nice shot showing the Alfetta can play nice with the other cars. Although really what’s going on here is me going slow to preserve the health of my co-driver… first chance I had I pulled over and the other three went shooting past! Nearly got stuck in the mud at the side of the road, which goes to show how much rain we’ve had.

Anyway, it was a fun, easy drive that won’t take you out of the range of your towing service. Thanks to Ben, Armando, and Fiid, who I believe were the main culprits in the organization, and thanks to Ben for the cool shots during the drive.

Tags: alfa romeo, alfetta gt, bernal, Driving, gt100, italian, sprint veloce

This entry was posted on February 1, 2010 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Driving. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.