In October of '04, I took a "short" 1,582 mile road trip in the el Camino down to Mississippi to attend Cruisin' the Coast. It's a week long festival of cars, music and good times. You can click on the registration logo above to visit their website and find more info. My brother and I have attended the previous two years, but without our cars. He has a beautiful '71 BMW 2002 that he has restored. We decided it would be fun to take both cars and make the run together. Definitely the right decision. It's fun to attend and see all the great cars....but it's much more fun when you have yours there to cruise around in.

The trip down was great, but pretty uneventful until we were just east of Lafayette, LA on I-10. We were communicating with each other by walkie-talkie and my brother told me to take the next exit due to overheating problems with his 2002. Luckily, it was only 2 miles ahead. When we raised (or tilted in his case) the hood at the truck stop/ gas station, there was coolant and steam everywhere. Thought it was a hose gone south at first.....but, no such luck. Something on the road had found it's way into his engine compartment and broken the tip of one of his plastic fan blades. It broke inward and ate a pathway into his radiator. Check the photos below.

Well.....the chances of finding a new radiator for a 1971 BMW in Lafayette are slim and none. So, we were faced with finding a good radiator repair shop. What luck. We found an excellent shop just 16 miles back. A-1 Radiator Service, Inc. Great guys who showed us true Cajun hospitality as they made the repairs. We were back on the road in two hours, tops. We were really fortunate the problem showed itself when it did. As you can see in the next photo, two miles farther east and we were on a no-exit, no-turnaround, had-to-be-20-mile-long bridge across a swamp!

The adventure in traveling made us a little late in arriving on Wednesday, but it was still a pleasurable drive down. Made it to Gulport in time to register and get settled in. We were cars number 5044 and 5045 out of a registered total of 5,365! But there were many more nice cars cruising that weren't registered. It's like a time warp. Everywhere you look are street rods, chopped top 50's cruisers, and every type of muscle car you can remember from the 60's and 70's. A car lovers paradise. Below are thumbnails of some of the photos we took while there. Click on the photo to see the full size image.

That's me fueling up......again. My Elky loves gas !

The BMW sips it !!

Created October 28, 2004