Mondial to Monterey 2015 travelogue

We thought Petaluma was great. We went downtown and walked around, went into some shops. There was a mid-week farmer's market going on. 2nd street was closed for it for a couple of blocks. We ate at a really nice farm-to-fork place for dinner.

 

Day 13: We drove from Petaluma, CA to Eureka, CA today. That was 275 miles. That may not seem like a lot, but we went via highway 1 along the coast. Our average speed was probably somewhere between 30 and 40 miles per hour. Even without traffic, I don't think I'd have been going much faster than that. It is a seriously twisty road, lots of 2nd and 3rd gear.

We also drove the "Avenue of the Giants" off highway 101 just south of Eureka. It's a 32 mile stretch winding through the Redwood forest. Of course we stopped to look at the trees along the way, and even managed a special detour. I can now say that I drove my Ferrari into a tree... and came out without a scratch! Yeah, I may be 10 years old.

It was cool this morning, so I drove about half the day with the top up. That's the first top-up driving all trip! I needed the top down before we got to the Redwoods, though. The experience would be missing something with the roof on the car.
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Parked along the coast highway.
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Driving through a tree!
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Mondial with Redwoods.
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I wish I could say that my travel story has a happy ending, but it doesn’t. My wife and I are fine, safe and unharmed. I cannot say the same for my Mondial. At approximately 2:15pm PST, I was travelling east on Interstate 84 approximately 25 miles east of Arlington, Oregon. There was a minivan in the same lane as me (the left-hand lane), in front of me by about 2 seconds. As we passed two cars and a semi-truck pulled off on the right-hand shoulder, I saw a dark shape emerge from under the minivan in front of me. I did not have time to maneuver to avoid it, and struck it virtually on the front centre-line of my vehicle. I would learn later that it was a large piece of driveline from the semi parked on the side of the road. There was a loud bang as my car struck the piece of driveline. The car jumped upward slightly as the front axle high-centered on the debris, rendering the steering inoperable. After several feet skidding on top of the debris, the piece of driveline dislodged and emerged out the back of the car. I braked, and safely pulled over to the right-hand shoulder. Once the car came to a stop, I checked myself and checked on the health and safety of my passenger, my wife. I then safely exited the vehicle and checked on the damage to the underside of the car. The car had hemorrhaged coolant for about 50 feet back up the highway, and was still spewing coolant. It was not from the radiator, but from a fitting I could not see about a foot behind the radiator. Also, the accelerator pedal was now lodged behind the brake pedal. The gear-shift linkage was operable, but the alignment had been damaged by the impact from the debris.

I know the most important thing in this entire incident is that no one was injured. After my initial inspection, I thought the damage might not be too terribly severe, that I might have gotten away with a punctured coolant pipe and a damaged throttle assembly. Once I jacked the car up, though… I discovered that the front cross-member of the frame suffered significant damage.

This is the surprising end for my 1988 Ferrari Mondial 3.2 Cabriolet. I am sadly confident that this is the last ride of 76621. After witnessing the twisted front clip of a Mondial QV last week, and hearing about a friend from Calgary whose 328’s front end was backed up onto by a GMC Yukon, and reminding myself after both of those incidents to be as careful as possible when driving home, my car will now be the subject of an insurance claim for which I am virtually certain it will be written off. 76621 had 65,991 miles on the odometer at the time of the accident. I was two and a half weeks from my sixth anniversary of ownership. We were 614 miles from home, after 3,067 miles so far on this trip.

If you look at the picture of my car from the back, with the trail of coolant out the back, what the picture doesn’t show is my guts strewn all over the highway behind the car as well. They were ripped from my stomach when I saw how bad the damage to the undercarriage was. I have been saying many of what I think are the right things, like, “it’s just a car,” or, “that’s what you have insurance for,” or, “it’s better to have loved and lost…” Mostly, I think you’re supposed to say these things to make yourself feel better. At the moment, it’s not working. I have tried not to beat myself up about what happened. I can’t stop replaying the accident over in my mind. I don’t think I could have swerved to avoid the debris (the thought that went through my mind as I first saw it was, “what is-BANG!”). I don’t think I followed the car in front too closely. I think there was no fault of my car’s or her driver’s. I think this was just a racing incident, as they say. Although, I really hope my car’s driver didn’t let her down. I am bracing for an unhealthy dose of survivor guilt.

Tomorrow, the most faithful Mondial (which is to say, the most faithful Ferrari, the most faithful car) an owner could ever want will go home on her shield, so to speak. I’ll let you all know what shakes out (After all, I’m not an automotive repair expert. Maybe, hopefully, I’m very much mistaken as to the amount of damage suffered, and it’s repairable. Or better yet, I’m still asleep in my hotel room in Portland dreaming this entire thing).

Even if my car is toast, I don’t regret driving the car down to California for this trip. At the side of the road, I told my wife that a bigger tragedy than having the car meet its demise this way would be not driving the car at all, as that seems to me a waste of what the car is. Don’t get me wrong, I fully respect the “preservation” movement. I think car museums, and museum-cars have their place, but 76621 was not one of those. She was a driver. She was made to be driven. I wish this hadn’t happened to her, but I don’t wish I hadn’t driven her. I bought an admission ticket to the Ferrari Amusement Park when I bought this car; I’ll be damned if I wasn’t going to ride the ride.

I was on the side of the road after the accident for four and a half hours waiting for a tow today. I had a lot of time to think about the accident and the car. I began to think of my trip in a strange way. Life has a way of making our plans irrelevant sometimes, and today is an example of that. But after I saw the damage, I had weird thoughts, like as though my car was a terminal patient with only a short time left to live, and this trip was like the “make-a-wish-foundation” for the last two weeks of its life. We drove a lot of miles and a lot of great roads. We visited national monuments and national parks. We drove through beautiful mountain passes. We drove a bridge 486 feet above the Snake river. We went to Reno and lived it up (and didn’t lose any money gambling!). We drove the Golden Gate Bridge. We drove through beautiful rolling hills in wine country, and if that isn’t what this car was made for, I belong in a padded room somewhere painting pictures of fruit with my toes. We went to the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance and rubbed elbows with automotive royalty. We went to the FCA meet, like a big family reunion for her. We drove the track at Laguna Seca (yeah, that was kind of a highlight). We drove the Pacific Coast Highway, and my arm muscles got happily tired working the wheel through all those turns. Through every mile, she was flawless.

That’s how I’ll remember her.
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More photos.
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Accelerator pedal seems to be in the wrong place.
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Ugliest thing I've ever seen.
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