HORK Enterprises
3221 Quick Road
Holly, MI 48442, USA
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1995 TR7 homecoming trip

Dates	:	December 27-30, 1995
Car	:	1980 Triump TR7
Distance	:	1200 miles (2000 km)
Codriver	:	Stephen C. Smith

My TR7 was shipped into New York in December. So right after Christmas my buddy Stephen and I flew into New-York to pick it up. The agent had had some trouble getting it into his depot, because the car wouldn't start (what else is new...). So we fiddled with it for a few hours: new points, new spark plugs, put the sparkplug wires in the right order... and Hey, Presto! we got it running. I could barely scrape the money together to pay for the handling fees in cash, but did, and we were on our way.

I figured that a bright yellow TR7 with a Dutch license plate, tearing across the US highways, might attract too much attention from law enforcement. If stopped, we would have a hard time explaining the Dutch title and registration, as well as the time and spatial distortions of the insurance papers. To cure all that we bolted an expired Florida license plate to the back of the car. Much less conspicuous! 😉

We took the car over New Jersey's toll roads and through Pennsylvania into Philadelphia. From there we continued through Maryland to Baltimore and into Washington, DC. By now it was late at night, but not too late to pay a visit to the Capitol and the White House, to see The First Lady's Christmas tree (I’ll take the fifth on that one).

The next day we tried to pick up the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia to take us to North Carolina, but we found it was closed because of seasonal weather. So instead we took the little roads that run more-or-less in the same direction. Some of them unpaved, some of them icy (some both). After a day as co-driver and now as driver, Mr. Smith started to realize that this TR7 was different from what he is used to driving (Big American Iron, mostly...). When I made an exit at the last second he uttered (much impressed) “My Trans-Am would have never made that !” I think he really fell in love with the car when he took it across some of those unpaved Appalachian Mountain roads. Gotta keep those revs up a bit. Then is goes fine!

We spent the night at “Mother’s” in Dillsboro, NC and set out for the final stretch through Georgia the next day. With the speedometer only reading km/h we were not quite sure of the highway speed limit conversion (at least that was what we would tell Georgia police, if stopped).
As the car had been so good to us (i.e. it didn’t break down) we decided to please it. The engine feels best when doing 3600 rpm, which translates to 130 km/h (80 mph) in fifth gear. Armed with a Dutch vehicle title, space and time displaced insurance papers (in Dutch) and expired Florida plate, we felt we were in good shape for a couple of nights in a Georgia slammer. But somehow, all of Georgia law enforcement was on holiday leave and we made it to Florida without a hitch.