Circus Time!

Oct. 3, 2016

Sunrise from our room at the Beau Rivage!

We left the hotel and stopped for breakfast at McElroys on the waterfront.  This local eatery was destroyed by Katrina and when rebuilt, was made 29 feet above sea level.  It may get blown down, but it will never flood!  Food and service was good.

We were preregistered for the show, so we cruised on down to the registration site, which was not supposed to open until 11:00 am.  We were early, so were in no hurry.  Then about a mile or so from the site, event traffic was directed to the right lane and it became bumper to bumper, crawling along at 0-2 mph!  Ugh!  But, we didn't overheat and finally made it to registration.  There were already hundreds and hundreds of cars there, and this is the first day!  We finally find a place to park and make our way to the registration tent.  Should be called a circus tent!  While the process was actually pretty efficient, it was just such a crush of people it was almost overwhelmed.  We stood in line for a while, but you meet and talk to people around you, find out where they're from, talk about cars, etc. as you slowly move along.  Inside the tent, the lines are divided by preregistration number, 0-1000, 1001-2000, all the way to 6000-6600.  That means that there are 6600 cars pre-registered!!  For the number of people, it actually moved pretty well.

Inside the registration tent!

After registration, we walked around and looked at some of the cars.  Every thing imaginable, some very nice, some not so much, but quite a variety.  As we were watching the cars turn into the site from the highway, one suddenly stopped right at the entrance.  Several people rushed to help push it out of the way.  I'm glad to say it was not an MG!  We've seen three other British cars - an MGB, a Sunbeam Tiger and an MG-TF.

Pushing a car and its NOT and MG!

Flames everywhere!!

This is the car on this years event T-shirt 

After leaving the registration site, we cruised down the coast highway and stopped at The Reef for lunch.  More good seafood!  The men's bathroom had some unusual fixtures!  

The Reef

Don't order the local craft beer here!!!

After lunch, we cruised back to Long Beach, where a parade was to take place.  We went to check out where the staging area was so we would know where it was, and planned to explore the town a little.  But, when we got to the staging area, it was already filling up.  Since it was limited to  the first 600 cars, we went ahead and pulled in and got in line.  This was another circus, but a good one!  Lots of different cars to look at.  We met some very nice people, from all over.  So, about 2 hours after we arrived, we started pulling out, but it was another 30 minutes before our row started moving!  What an experience!  It was like a Mardi Gras parade as we moved about 2 mph.  Thousands of people lined the route to see the cars, and many cars threw beads and stuffed animals to them.  It was fun, but don't know if we'd do it again.  As we came to the end of the parade, it became a traffic jam as the parade cars tried to make their way back into the normal traffic.  Thus far, the police had done a good job with the parade route, but dropped the ball at the end.  

Staging for the Long Beach parade!

We finally got back onto the coast highway and drove to Shaggy's, where we had dinner.  We had a nice table outside where we could see the cars driving down the highway.  Dinner and service were again good and we then made it back to the hotel.  The drive back was perfect MG weather.  While there are sections of Hwy. 90 where traffic backs up due to traffic lights, there are places with no lights for a couple of miles and you can just cruise and enjoy the sights and sounds.  Very nice.