Jaguar Forums - Jaguar Enthusiasts Forum - Show & Shine Report, As Requested

It was a shaky start on Friday afternoon, when one thing after another came up delaying our departure.

We planned to stay in a hotel in Sacramento Friday night to more easily meet the group at the specified Starbucks at 8am. Had we left Saturday morning, it would have had to be at 0:dark-thirty and that was simply too early for such a full day as Saturday promised to be.

We finally left the house a 3pm, Just in time to hit Sacramento at 5pm and the Friday evening rush! I did NOT look forward to that, but Oh Well.

We hadn't got 6 miles from the house when Nix began pulling seriously to the right while climbing a railroad overpass. She had a flat tire! What a great way to start off!!

There was no room to pull off to the side on the overpass, of course, so I had to drive on the flat to the other side where I could pull us off. We unloaded the trunk/boot and found the spare was flat (of course) but also found no jack or lug wrench. Big surprise! NOT! I had planned to check that out earlier but was prevented by some other matter that seemed more pressing at the time. (Those deficiencies are now resolved.)

I tried to call a neighbor for help but my phone was dead, just to add to the tension of the moment! I had intended putting the charger in Nix that day instead of the Wart where it's lived till now but so many things went wrong it completely slipped my mind.

Husband walked out to the main road and hitched a ride back to the house. There he loaded up Toad (green Toyota pickup) with the Nix jack (special low-jack), a spider lug wrench and the air tank. He also called Les Schwab in the next town to see how long they were open. We had until 6pm. He returned with tools at 4:30pm.

Several Good Samaritans stopped by in the meantime but I was OK to wait with the car. I had enough time standing there alone to contemplate that this delay was not altogether a bad thing. Depending how long it took to get back on the road we should miss the Friday evening freeway drama in Sac. The hotel was not hard to get to so I calmed down quite a lot while walking around Nix and thinking. It wasn't hot and there was a nice breeze. Not a bad afternoon weather wise.

We got the tire changed and all the stuff loaded back in Toad and came back to the house, dropped off Toad, repacked all our stuff and took off again. We got to Les Schwab at 5:40.

"Can you fix this, are we too late?" "No problem, I can fix you up." Very nice guy. They'll get all our tire business from now on! The valve stem had broken resulting in the almost instant flat. Inspection of the tire revealed I hadn't damaged it by driving on it. >whew<

It was late enough that we stopped for supper before hitting I-5 to Sacramento. That was a good idea. Maybe because of the Intense day, maybe because the car was again road worthy, maybe because of my earlier contemplation, it was a relaxing supper.

After all that, we did get to our hotel with no problem, our room was quite reasonable with AAA discount, and it was a Very nice room. We asked if there was a bottle shop within walking distance. HA! Not in that area! So he got me a bottle of cheap white wine (CWW) from the hotel snack shop. It's not often you get to buy a screw top bottle of cheap wine for $27!

Next morning we found the designated meeting place with a gas station right across the street. We were the first ones to arrive. After about 10 minutes the trip leader arrived, then other members wandered in and we left on time.

The show was interesting. The organizers expected perhaps 300 cars total; 142 had pre-registered including me and one other club member. But they had an additional 400 register at the gate! To say they were Overwhelmed is a Massive Understatement!

They didn't have enough food, didn't have enough porta-potties, didn't have enough display area and ended up parking cars along the access road for a distance of over a mile besides the planned display pad.

They didn't have enough judges and they didn't have enough personnel to handle that crowd. Spectators were still coming 3 hours after we checked in at 9am. Traffic was backed up for a couple miles trying to get in. It was the sort of Massive response that makes organizers sorry they ever thought of it in the first place.

Some people griped, some of those quite loudly, some people left early. One beautifully painted Chevy lost a fuse for the radiator fan, overheated his engine and went home on a flat bed. But no one got belligerent, everyone was well behaved.

We were parked over the brow of a hill about a mile from the main part of the show (cars extended far beyond where we parked), the originally planned display area. When we got to where we could see the rest of it, WOW! There were cars, campers, Airstreams, caravans, trucks and people, Thousands of them down there not to mention venders!

There were Many Corvettes. There were Many Mustangs. There were Many Firebirds/TransAms. There were a couple dozen 50s Chevys, several old Ford pickups and a few Mercuries. There were very few imports actually, the show seemed to be dominated by GM. Although there was a Beautiful old Bentley, a couple nice MGs and a couple TRs. There were also paint jobs that cost more than our house!!

And would you care to guess how many Jaguars attended? 2. Yes TWO! Mine and a fellow club member were the ONLY Jaguars on the grounds. (They required 10 for a class so we weren't judged) There were more Studebakers (4) than Jaguars!

So I needn't have worried about the Trailer Queens from the SF Bay area, and I think I know the reason they didn't attend. They had read in this forum that Nix was entered in the show, and they were all frightened off by the very thought of competing against such Quality, Grace, Beauty and Presence. And that's my story and I'm sticking to it! LOL

But even so we all enjoyed ourselves immensely. Probably not enough to want to do it again any time soon, but it was fun to do at least once while we had the opportunity.

A few photos are attached. I'll put more over in the Photography section in the thread, Ione Show & Shine. Some of the pictures are labeled but most are not. If you don't know what the car is, I probably don't know either.
(';')