Old Timer Garage

If you haven't read the second part of this restoration you can find it by clicking on this link: 1960 Cadillac Coupe de Ville - part 2

3. Arrival in the US and more complications

On this September morning, it is 4 am when I get out of the house. It is starting to get cold in the UK at this time of the year but I know that in Arizona, the monsoon season is just over and it is still 30 to 40 degrees Celsius every day so I will at least be able to enjoy a little more sun before I come back to the UK. The months of October and November are the most difficult ones for me in the UK. The weather starts to get cold and it rains all the time. From December, the atmosphere changes a little with Christmas preparation which makes the weather easier to bear and then from January on, days start to lengthen so it is nicer.
So there I am at the airport at 4.30 am this morning. I will first fly to Amsterdam where I will have a connection for Minneapolis, Minnesota where I will then connect to my last flight of the day towards Arizona.

And because it was too easy, problems keep coming: first of all, at the airport, I am asked to produce a paper copy of my ESTA. It is the first time I am asked to show it. Usually, as long as the visa is approved, it appears in the passport system so the hard copy isn’t needed but this time for whatever reason, they asked for it. Everything single time before that, I always had the paper copy with me just in case and nobody had asked for it so this time I didn’t print it out thinking that I wouldn’t be asked to show it and well… they did. It took a few minutes to my still sleepy brain to remember where to find the email confirmation where I had the reference number of my ESTA request so that they could find it in the system again. I am forever thankful for smartphone connected to internet because the person at the counter was already telling me that I wasn’t going to be able to fly if I didn’t have it. It is lucky that I had planned to arrive at the airport early to have time to go on the terrace watch the aircraft coming in to land. In the end, I will go straight through security checks and to my gate.

It is the first time that I book my flights for the US with the same airline so I didn’t have much choice with regards to connections and I end up with pretty short connection times. It should be enough but it doesn’t leave much leeway if one of the flights gets delayed or if I need to wait at the security checks at the connections. The one I am most worried about is Minneapolis. I am only going to have 90 minutes to make the connection and the last 2 times I went to the US, it almost took me 3 hours. Granted it was in Los Angeles and Minneapolis is much smaller but I am not completely sure that it is going to be enough and I have made sure there is another flight later on that day to connect me to Arizona in case I miss the connection.

On hour later, I am landing in Amsterdam. I know this airport by heart for having landed here in average 60 times a year for the past 7 years so I know exactly where I need to go to avoid the long queues and I have a good reason to do that: on the boarding pass for my transatlantic leg of this journey, the mention “SSSS” appears next to my flight number. Now, if you are not familiar with air travel, these 4 S’s stand for Secondary Security Screening Selection. It is supposed to be a random selection (I say supposed here because the selection criteria doesn’t look so random to me. Among them: how many times you go to your destination, for how long, where from etc…) but what it mostly means to me today is that I am going to have to go through further security checks before I am allowed to get on my next flight and with the connection time already pretty short, I am going to have to hope I am lucky and the queues are not too long today.

As soon as the plane has stopped at its bay, I rush to the additional security checks desk. I know where it is so I am among the first ones there. I just have one hour left before the next flight takes off and considering the gate closes at least 15 minutes before take-off, it is going to be short. There is no time to waste, I answer all the questions I am asked, I am given a red card and I go to my gate where further checks will be performed. I arrive just as the boarding process starts and as soon as I show my red card, I am taken aside to a different lane for further checks. My hand luggage is tested further too: tests for explosives, for drugs, body search for me and a few minutes later, I am back in the queue with all the “normal” people. It looks like I will make my connection in the end, with just a few minutes to spare but I will make it. I just have to hope that everything will be OK with this flight and that the connection in Minneapolis will be quick. For now, I settle down and enjoy the next few hours.
For a few months already, airlines have started to offer wifi access for travellers during their flights which allows me to check my emails and realise that my friend who is going to drive my car on a trailer to my brother’s place emailed me to let me know that his employee who is going to drive the trailer wants to leave at 3 am to be back in town early in the day… After everything I have gone through since I left home this morning, one more constraint or one less what’s the difference right? I am just hoping I won’t get to Arizona too late to pick up my rental car and sleep a few hours to recover from jetlag before having to wake up in the middle of the night to drive 3 hours south to my brother’s. If my seriousness and dedication to this project isn’t clear enough to all these people now, I don’t know what else I can do…

Anyway, for the time being, there is nothing else I can do so I enjoy my transatlantic flight and chat to my neighbour who is nice and happy to chat the flight away. I love these in-flight discussions. Many people hate people who try to talk to them when they travel but for me it is the complete opposite, I don’t like people who just sit there next to me and don’t even look at me or say hi when we are going to be sat next to each other for the next few hours. I get that some people don’t like to talk to strangers but a minimum of courtesy has never killed anyone. Besides, I have met wonderful people during flights like these. To name just a few: a container ship captain explained me the shame of the waves on the different oceans and how to recognize where you are thanks to it, an entrepreneur who created a company that produced plastic toys for children invited me to have a drink because of a delay of hour flight due to a strike, a couple of people who were going to China to get VW Beetle spare parts manufactured for collectors in France… all of them very interesting people with whom I spent a nice few hours.

For this particular flight, it is a truck driver. He is British but has been living in the US for the past few years and he explains me how he got to do that, how he got his green card and how he now is his own boss after less than 4 years, driving his own truck over 20,000 miles per month and making 10 to 15,000 dollars or revenue per month. The 9 hour flight flies by and we land in Minneapolis. The running starts again. I have to collect my luggage first since this is my first stop in the US, then pass immigration checks before checking my luggage in again and run to my next gate to board my last flight to Arizona. All this in 90 minutes.

In the end, 90 minutes will be OK. Minneapolis is a small airport (small for America I mean) and there are not too many flights landing at the same time as us so the queues at the immigration checks are relatively short.
I waste a few more minutes to get a new boarding pass printed out because of the “SSSS” mention on the one they printed out for me this morning and I am in front of my last boarding gate of the day.

I just have a 3 hour flight ahead of me and I can’t remember who was sitting next to me so probably someone who didn’t talk this time.
As opposed to the UK and Minneapolis, the sky clears up very quickly after take-off and I can enjoy the view. Endless flat terrain everywhere with huge straight roads crossing it for as far as the eye can see.

To my surprise, when we land in Phoenix, the ground is wet. I rained earlier in the afternoon which is pretty rare but at least has the advantage of refreshing the temperature that can still be pretty high there at this time of the year.

A quick call to my driver for the trailer while I wait for my luggage and we agree to meet at the workshop tonight at 2.45 am and I am off to pick up my rental car for the week. I found a pretty cheap price for a Nissan Sentra (equivalent of the Renault Laguna in Europe give or take).
The jetlag is easier to handle for me when I travel west than when I fly back to Europe but luckily I don’t have far to drive because although it is the end of the afternoon in Arizona, I have already been awake for 21 hours and I am starting to feel tired.

I pick up my car and drive the 20 minutes that get me in front of my friend’s workshop. I am supposed to meet him to discuss quickly about the car.

He is struggling to walk because of the accident he had and shows me the parts that have been ordered for my car. The primer and the paint are already ready for my car and he also gives me the registration documents in my brother’s name.
All the dates on the documents are from the very same day (I paid for the car 2 months ago and this trip was also planned around the same time). I don’t pay too much attention to it and just remember thinking that maybe they didn’t believe me when I first said I would take on this project and they actually waited until they were pretty sure I was actually going to come to pick up the car… who knows…

It is 5 pm and the workshop is closing for the day so I take the boxes with the paint and other products for my car, put everything in the trunk of the rental and drive off to check in my hotel. I quickly prepare everything I need for the next day, get a shower and I am in my bed before 7.30 pm to get a few hours of sleep before having to wake up again at 2 am.

I am a bit worried about the 3 hour drive south tonight because of the jetlag and the tiredness of the travel I just did but for right now, I am too tired to think about it and I fall deep asleep… until my alarm wakes me up at 2 am…

To be continued… here: 1960 Cadillac Coupe de Ville - part 4