Floating Phil

Trying to stay in touch with the world while sharing my adventure, posting some photographs and recording my thoughts.

It is Gypsy day… for the car.

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Phil

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My dad and I moved the car today to the new premises to make future work a little more easy, 
 
To start with, it took a little muscle work to move the final stuff (like old stationary engines) away from behind the car.  This unblocked the rear and soon after I could start and reverse the car out.  Not sure why my dad gave me this job, to do a 4 point turn, reversing the car out of the garage and point it towards the gate of his old workplace on the main road?  To be honest, it feels a little surreal, the car being in a drivable state and also (hopefully) the last time it will leave this address.  Lots of “firsts” today.
 
I had fairly little involvement getting the car to this point, with my dad doing most of the work in the last 3 months while I was off doing other stuff.  Lots of feelings, gratitude for the effort he invested and a little bitter sweet.  As the following days go by, little by little, the car is transferring ownership away from my dad and onto me.  It feels like a huge responsibility and I am trying to accept a gift that I am not sure I am ready to receive.  Perhaps I didn’t think that I would ever be ready to receive this gift, and it feel like I am living in la-la land a little.  On the other side of the coin, I can only imagine the feelings my dad must be experiencing, this was a dream for him, that didn’t all turn out exactly as he planned, but a dream indeed.  52-year in his possession… that is more than half a lifetime. 
 
Back to today:  Dad drove the car to the new place and I snapped a couple of photo’s in the sun.  There is still a lot of soul left in the car, and we need to be careful, trading off fixing the car (reliability) vs. beauty, heritage and the soul of the car.  We completed some other odds and ends and made preparations to take work home to complete on Sunday.  The brakes remain the main thing on the list to fix.
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43.5323 – 172.5567
31 August 2024
FP-233

4 responses to “It is Gypsy day… for the car.”

  1. It’s a heck of a thing for father & son to work together on. I will break with tradition and not say “I can imagine what you are both going through” because I can’t. But you give us a sense of something that will be with you for life and it is priceless.
    Oh, and the car looks great now a quarter century of dust has been lovingly removed.