Have you ever seen the wonderful/creepy/superbly suspensful old Hitchcock thriller "Strangers on a Train?" If so, you'll surely have burned in among your cherished movie memories the harrowing "runaway carousel" sequence at the end where the ride operator gets hit by an errant cop bullet (while the hero and villian are in life-or-death combat amongst the prancing wooden horses and temporarily happy children) and, as he falls, he pushes the main control stick all the way to WARP SPEED.

You can watch it all HERE if you like.

It's pretty damn good.

But the point here is that's what Carol and my lives have sorta been like since my last thorough (some say "interminable") e-blast in mid-August. See, we've been on an extended, exhausting, whirlwind road-trip odyssey (in our packed-to-the-gunwales Honda Odyssey, in fact) that has fallen somewhere between Book Tour, Traveling Circus and Forced March. We've been through set-up, book sales-and-schmoozing mode, and tear-down at the wonderful and worthwhile Geneva Concours (Geneva, Illinois, not the other one), the World Challenge at Road America, the Lime Rock, Connecticut, Vintage Festival, both at the track and at the downtown street party at SVRA 's Watkins Glen, NY extravaganza and back to Road America for the VSCDA's incomprable ELVF...on successive weekends! Then a weekend off to catch our breath, do some laundry (a whole bunch, in fact) in our own beloved basement and then back on the road to the oft-spectacular but occasionally soggy SCCA National Championship runoffs at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Where I saw Roger Penske and he moreover remembered me, smiled, bumped fists and we chatted for a bit.

Wow.

And I want to tell you all about it.

And also about the new and hopefully upcoming, mainstream-book-store "re-introduction" of THE LAST OPEN ROAD that we've been working on with a major book distributor for next Fathers' Day...fingers crossed!

Only I can't tell you any of that stuff. Not right now. Because I'm packing just as soon as I finish this (and I'm over on time already) so's I can go back to Road America for the Midwest Automotive Media Association (MAMA) "Spring Rallye" (COVID-delayed, natch), wherein a bunch of motoring journalists, commentators, bloggers, webmasters and "influencers" (I still don't know what that means) are allowed to flog the living shit out of some really neat cars on track at Road America, sample the road manners of various family sedans, SUVs, econoboxes and luxury cruisers on the surrounding country roads, listen to the latest hype, facts and gossip from assorted manufacturers and eat great free food until our pants-buttons pop.

All in the line of journalistic duty, I assure you...

But I'll be home again on Thursday afternoon, at which time Carol and I will get back to the divine but daunting drudgery of shipping all the blessed & long-delayed hardback copies of STEAMROLLER III: OUT OF THE MIST that you fine folks have ordered. Thank you all!

As of yesterday, we'd shipped several hundreds of the damn things, but that only brought us up to books ordered at Road America in July (we're trying our best to ship them in the order the orders were received) and we just got in the finished, medallion-affixed, leather-bound Special Editions for our beloved sponsors and advertisers.

Please be patient with us. We're doing our best.

But I gotta run now. Another adventure awaits.

So look for your ordered books in the mail (we're going as fast as we can) and we've got an off weekend ahead--finally--and I'll hopefully get the first installment of my BIG TWO-HEARTED ROAD TRIP blog off to you on the interwebs while I'm at it.

More anon, and thanks for lending me your eyeballs...

And now, a pair of brief commercial reminders: