As intended, we have been back in the States and have done a tad over 4000 miles in the past 30 days. We sailed out of New Brunswick, Canada into Calais, Maine on the 22nd of September, landing that evening in Bar Harbor, ME to visit Tom Lange and his son at MG T Repair where there were at least five T-types stuffed into a relatively small work shop. Since then we have visited only a handful of fields and a few clubs and fixed only a few cars. On 10/29 we had a nice long Saturday tour called The Speckled Hen Run out of West Dover, VT with some friends from Connecticut MG Club and British Cars of New Hampshire.

Shop hopping in Massachusetts

The primary effort in the past month has been visiting 100 shops in the northeast, and we are nowhere near finished here yet. I am not going to even list the 100 shops here, but you can find the notes and hundreds of photos to match on my web site. We have run through Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts. The most notable day may have been a high-speed catamaran ferry ride (people only, no cars) to Nantucket Island to visit one shop on a Saturday. We made 29 miles across Nantucket Bay in one hour flat, dock to dock, with speeds up to 45-mph on the open water. We were there to visit Chris Witte and his shop Classic Motor Services where he services vintage British cars. After the shop visit we got a nice truck tour around the island, then back on the ferry for return to the mainland the same day.

40-mph catamaran ferry to Nantucket

From there were running through Rhode Island, Connecticut, and on into New York city. After visiting a couple of shops in NYC we were in the right neighborhood to take the Queensboro Bridge across to Long Island on Friday 10/12 and rambled through a few shops the same day. After killing the weekend, we did more shop hopping on the island on Monday 10/15 before return across the Queensboro Bridge during evening rush hour. That four days crawling around the NYC metro area may have been the worst driving experience of the past 4-1/2 years, but the car survived okay, and we got the job done. Then going north, we bounced off Pittsfield, MA momentarily before proceeding to far upstate New York to run west along the Canadian border again. Currently sitting in Rochester, New York on Sunday 10/21.

Burnett's father and son team, third generation

Some of the more notable shops visited would be in order. How about Maine Radiator where we can still get the original style cell cores for the MGA. Brit Bits in Rye, NH is still doing service and restoration work, and they have about 40 vintage British cars in inventory. We found a new (previously unknown) shop,Northern Motorsport in White River Junction, VT. They are servicing British cars (among other things) and had done a lot of work on an MGA for a friend a few years ago. We stopped at Burnett's Garag in Wenham, MA with a father and son team, now a third-generation family business opened by the grandfather in 1946. It became an MG dealer in 1956 just in time for introduction of the MGA, and they sold a lot of MGA and MGB new. We found one shop in Swampscott, MA to be closed, but in its place, we also found two new Brit car shops not previously known.

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