Story by Paul Kramer and Photos by Ed Kramer
The Pebble Beach Concours, the Quail Motorsports Gathering, the Historic races, countless car shows, auctions at every turn and, of course, automotive sculpture wherever you go: all this is now synonymous with one word “Monterey.” I don’t have to tell my car friends I’m going to the Historic races, I simply say “Monterey” and they get it. Monterey is not for the faint of heart. It is not for the pretenders who think they are car enthusiasts. It is for those hardcore individuals who have 20w50 coursing through their veins. It is an event that separates the men from the boys. It is an 18-hour day filled with the sounds of 12 cylinder engines, the smell of 100 octane and the sight of the most stunning automobiles in the world.
Each year, planning starts at the tail end of the previous event. My dad (Ed) and I have been making this pilgrimage for more than a decade. What baseball is to some fathers and sons, car shows are to us. Our scorecards are lists of the cars we saw and would want to park in our garage. On the drive home from each event, we start to make notes of things we would do differently, tweaks to make the event more enjoyable, as well as ways to pack in more cars in a 24-hour period than humanly possible. It all begins with the journey north. My dad has carefully collected trip maps of years past showing all the different routes we have taken. We piece together a fun drive of past roads that we love and always include a few new ones that we have either heard about or that looked good on a map (thanks to Google Maps). Of course, the drive begins with lunch at one of our favorite Mexican restaurants, Los Agaves in Santa Barbara, CA. We fill up on home made “authentic” Mexican cuisine. My personal favorite is their zucchini blossoms quesadilla. While eating mouthfuls of this succulent cuisine, we get excited as we see other exotics pull up for lunch. Our maps are spread across the table as we discuss with our entourage the day’s itinerary.
Once our route is decided and our bellies are full, we top off our tanks and begin our 6-hour tramp through the beautiful California Central Coast countryside. With our windows down, smells of fresh strawberries and cabbage fill our car as Ventura Highway by America blasts through our radio. For a moment, all of our stresses fade away in the distance so that all that is left is the remains of the winding road in our rear view mirror. By time we pull into our Monterey motel, we have forgotten work and are ready to “main-line” the Monterey experience.
The motel parking lot looks like a bubble gum machine with brightly colored car covers hugging the sleek lines of its contents. We are anxious and want to start pulling car covers to take a peak, but we know that within less than 12 hours, the parking lot will sound like the starting grid of LeMans. We force ourselves to get some sleep as our day tomorrow starts early.
We awake to the sound of the whine of a supercharger just outside our door…immediately followed by a dose of unburned fuel from a carburetor running rich. Ahhh, I love Monterey in the morning! Within moments, we grab coffee, food, backpacks, car keys and are out the door. The parking lot is alive with a mini-car show in itself. Owners are bustling about getting their cars ready and warmed up. Everything from a twin turbo charged 80’s Ferrari GTO to a Citroen C2V adorn our barely-AAA-rated motel (they don’t leave the light on for you, just the toilet seat up). 
As we crawl out of the parking lot, my trusty navigator (Ed), guides us to the first activity: the Pebble Beach Concours Rolling Tour.
This event is an absolute must! It has become one of my favorite events. Not because it is free and the vendors serve coffee and doughnuts, but because it is a collection of many of the Pebble Beach Concours participating vehicles that are preparing for a 50-mile jaunt around the Monterey Peninsula. As the fog hangs low in the early morning air, over 100 vintage cars purr as their engines begin to warm up.
There is this buzz of energy in the air. We all know it is the event that really marks the beginning of the weekend festivities. Regardless of the damp Monterey weather, everyone has beaming smiles on their faces. We look like a pack of kids hovering outside the living room on Christmas morning. Eventually, the last car rolls out and, while they are doing their drive, we find great parking on Ocean Avenue in Carmel and park our butts on stools at A. W. Shucks Oyster Bar. We sip Bloody Marys and gorge on tasty pub food while we wait for the rolling tour to finish just outside the door. Within the next couple of hours, downtown Carmel comes alive with the roar of over 800 cylinders screaming in all octaves as they fill both sides of the streets. It is literally a concours flash mob. We spend the rest of the afternoon wandering around the Monterey Peninsula checking out several of the auctions to see what we can’t afford.
By evening, we are thirsty again and cruise over to The Cantina restaurant. This is an old Mexican restaurant with a distinctive automotive theme. It looks like an abandoned gas station from the 50’s. The small diner parking lot is crammed with over 100 hot rods and exotics. Live music fills the dense foggy air as enthusiasts check out each other’s cars.
The morning comes a little too soon, but it is ok because we are about to enter Italian automotive nirvana: the Concourso Italiano. The motto here is “nothing exceeds like excess.” You know how couples sometimes begin to look like each other? Well, here they look like their car. I saw a couple crawling out of their Testarossa. The husband with his fresh hair implants and the wife with her other implants. They were both clad in bright red from their paten leather shoes to their ascots. Even their pocket poodle was wearing a Suderia sweater. I wanted to barf. However, like with an accident, I couldn’t help but stare. The rest of the event is simply awesome. Hundreds of Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Alfas and other obscure Italian marques fill the lawn of a local Monterey golf course. The site is simply overwhelming and wonderful all at once. It is an afternoon of mocking and gawking.
Saturday morning the weekend takes a dramatic U-turn. We attend the 3rd annual 
Concours d’Lemons, which is a celebration of the oddball, mundane, and truly awful of the automotive world. Here, mediocrity is king and we snap photos posing next to everything from a 25,000-original-mile Pinto wagon to a Dodge van wrapped in tin foil. A stunning collection of recent 24-Hour-d’Lemons racecars had a strong presence. Our personal favorite was an early 80’s Porsche 924 with a hatchback converted into a wooden ¼ scale house porch. They were giving away lovely “PORCH Racing Team” decals. This grassroots event is growing in popularity every year. We can’t wait to attend the first annual Concours d’Lemons Auction.
From there, we skip over the hill to the famous and historical racetrack at Laguna Seca. This twisty road coarse has hosted some of the most famous races in the world. It is now home to the Motorsport Reunion, which is a weekend of vintage racecars from all eras. Our personal favorites are the post 1960 cars, which are running Saturday afternoon. One field was a tribute to the anniversary of the Ferrari GTO. The field had nearly two dozen of some of the most valuable Ferrari racecars ever produced. 
Sitting in the PCA/BMWCCA club corral between turn 4 and 5, we assigned dollar values to each car as it roared by. Total field purchase price came to over $70,000,000. The participants were very polite and drove gingerly when it came to overtaking. One of my favorite races was the Trans Am race. Here, Porsche 935s belched fire through their exhaust as the downshifted. BMW CSLs looked like they were floating by as they reached speeds of over 135mph! It was simply awesome.
As the weekend of festivities slowly came to an end, we had one more event that required all of our energy: 
The Dawn Patrol. Like Errol Flynn, we arose at 4:00am (which is asking a lot on a 5-day weekend filled with parties every night) to witness the Pebble Beach Concours D’Elegance participants roll onto the 18th hole of this famous golf course. Just getting into the area they call 17-mile drive feels like the Great Escape. Every turn has security checking and double checking your identification. From the back of the car, all I can see are dense forests in the narrow beams of the headlights. Finally, we find ourselves standing by the entry sipping coffee (provided by Hagerty’s) with anticipation of the first car to roll in. Finally, just as the morning fog begins to lift and the hues of dawn fill the calm bay, the dim lights of pre-war cars begin to drift by us with ease. The highlight of the morning was a stunning factory Mercedes 300 SLR driven by Sir Stirling Moss.
We could hear the car from over a ½ mile away. Its roar caused the local geese to take flight. Flames ripped out of the exhaust as the big cams turned with effort at this low idle. Half way onto the lawn, the driver revved the motor and did a beautiful burn out on the golf cart path…it was like watching Van Gogh sign a painting. By 9am, we were gone. Massive crowds began to jockey for parking as we quietly slipped away in a cab back to our hotel.
Late Sunday night, we arrived back in Orange County. It all felt surreal. Were we really there? Did that really happen? For the next week, we found ourselves walking around in a drunken-like stupor. Eventually, I picked up the phone and booked our hotel for next year…