It’s Sunday, September 20th, about 5PM and Susan and I just got back from a 3 day excursion of the Michigan shore called Lights and Librations which is the “Lord Schroeder & Lady Ann’s” 2009 Wine & Cheese-type tour for the Chicagoland MG Club!
It started Friday morning, meeting at John’s place at 9:30AM and then continuing to the Lincoln Oasis for more of the faithful with a final count being some 21 cars. What an event!! I won’t get into tooooo…. many details as I am sure these will be reported elsewhere on the newsletter. I will say that Susan and I have come to look forward to these “tour-type” events and this was one of the best yet!
I am not going to discuss the various restaurants or attractions we visited – I want to talk about the people! 43 folks of all sizes, shapes, backgrounds and age coming together for a single common reason. Well, I guess we have to give the MG some credit for being the catalyst but that is not the dynamic at work here. What I am trying to convey here is best described by the one the great “customs” of these tours. This is the evening parking lot gathering. To start, it is now common place to see folding chairs, cigars, coolers of beer and wine as a normal accoutrement in the MG trunk right along side the clothes bag and sun block.
The tour itself was extremely well structured and coordinated by the Lord and Lady Schroeder but it was also the informal gathering of the faithful at the day’s end that alerted me to the other element at play in this club! Well, there we were outside the Baymont in the darkness of the first night (Friday). The beer was open and cigars lit. Conversation was jovial! We had 2 good friends sporting their English roadsters which were not MGs who have been there with our group before and will certainly be with us again because they are truly club members!
The question was raised about their “marques” club activities and the reply was, well, let’s just say they prefer the real people of the Chicagoland MG Club!! They enjoy our friendliness, our environment of camaraderie and I guess the down-to-earth nature that is the club we have.
At lunch on Sunday in Michigan City, one could feel the

warmth in the room, the jokes, the stories, the laughing! We all sang “happy birthday” to a club member and the crowd actually got just about all the way through before we realized that the person of honor was not in the room!
For those reading this passage who may have not joined one our driving events I would like to extend a personal initiation to them to come on out and get to know us a little better!

PS – Special thanks to the Schroeder’s hard work in constructing Lights & Libations and the Herman’s (for the now season’s front-end tour i.e. Jo Davis) as they have fortified the social dimension of the club!
-- Ralph Arata