The Western Maryland Street Rod Roundup

Almost every year on Labor Day weekend, we visit our dear friends Rebecca and Nelson down in Cumberland, MD. Labor Day weekend is the last weekend I have free every summer before beginning the choir season again at Lancaster Church of the Brethren, so it's a great weekend to get away. But we don't get to skip church! Rebecca is a Methodist minister, so we usually wind up providing some sort of special music for her service. This year was no exception.



We stayed in a downtown motel, and to my surprise there was a BMW Z-car club having some sort of gathering at the same hotel. I was really sorry we weren't in the Z3 Coupe. We had taken the "big car" - Mary Ellen's GTI. Anyway, the group had their own roped-off parking. The line was anchored by the alpha dog of Z-cars in terms of performance: the Z4 M Coupe.

The rest of the line consisted of Z4 Roadsters (one was a Z4 M Roadster) and a matching pair of Z3 M Roadsters:

The other big draw in Cumberland on that weekend is an annual street rod roundup at the county fairgrounds. As many as 1000 street rods show up, and most of the owners camp on the grounds in accommodations ranging from pup tents to high-end motor homes.

We took a couple of hours early on Saturday morning to see what we could find. As with the Hemmings show we attended recently, I took far too many photos to put in a blog post. This link should take you to the Picasa set I made of all the pictures:

https://plus.google.com/photos/114749089807509671958/albums/6053881693914937249

Of course, there was more to the trip than just cars - look at this frittata that Rebecca made for brunch that morning:

And Saturday evening, Nelson grilled a whole leg of lamb over charcoal. I forgot to get a picture of that, but it was really excellent, and we had an impromptu wine tasting to go with it. From left to right, wines from Uruguay, the Republic of Georgia, and France. France won!