Post
by DLodge » Mon Jul 18, 2022 9:54 am
More seriously, the St. Louis club has had an annual Overnight Tour since 1992. (They have all been planned and organized by our tour chairman, Sam Atkinson, and he has been on every one up to this year, when a last-minute positive Covid test sidelined him. Very frustrating.) I am no expert but have ridden with Sam a few times in his modern car to help plan the route. For a same-day tour, I would agree that driving it in a T is a good idea, but for a two-day tour, that is time consuming. Sam (and I sometimes) got very good at mentally converting a trip from modern to T. ("I think this is a low-gear hill." "I agree, definitely low gear.") Since Model T clubs tend to be composed of an older demographic, be sure to build in enough rest stops and list them in the route description. Since the destinations of our overnight tours generally are 80-120 miles from St. Louis, the lunch stop is planned and included in the tour route. In our case, the tour usually includes a point of interest in the destination city, dinner at a reasonably nice (but not too pricey) restaurant near the destination hotel, and then a different route back home the next day. This year we left at 7:00 am and took back roads (i.e. state highways and the like, including the Grafton Ferry across the Mississippi to Illinois), stopped for lunch, then ended up at the Illinois state capitol, where we were given an excellent tour of the building, then on to the hotel, checked in and went a few blocks to a nice Italian restaurant (where we had a separate room). The next day, we went home by a different route.
The last vehicle in the overnight tour is a pickup with a trailer and a selection of tools. ("Trouble truck," "vulture wagon" or whatever you prefer to call it.) We always hope we won't need it, but it's nice to have if we do.