My 7th Carlisle Ford Nationals was a great time. I brought my oldest son with me which made for a very different experience. He attended my very first Carlisle in 2007. That was so long ago that it is only a faint memory for him. My brother also attended this Carlisle with his daughter. He last attended Carlisle in 2008 which was before he had a Mustang. He now owns a 2008 GT/CS.

Both of our children did a great job keeping pace with us. On Friday we walked 7 miles and on Saturday we walked 9 miles. They didn’t complain and were up for anything.

Carlisle wouldn’t be Carlisle without rain. This year it started for the second half of Thursday’s drive down. We drove the last 150 miles in the rain. I again joined 5pt0joe on his “Cruise to Carlisle”. The forecast for Friday was not good. This was the first time that I didn’t wash my car upon arriving in Carlisle.

As predicted, Friday was a full day of rain. We tried to get out from under cover during periods of light rain. Thankfully, we had the tent which allowed some shelter for the kids to play their video games.

The tent was also another point of variance from the usual. It was not located in the class in which almost all of our feature cars fall – the 1987-93 Mustang LX stock class. It was about two classes away. This was a let down. The events staff had a new member in charge of clubs for this year and I had asked ahead of time if our tent would still be in our class and he had communicated that that was the plan. What changed, I don’t know and my question to him in that regard has gone unanswered.

It almost didn’t matter because most people who had registered with our club had not brought their feature cars. I had my ’91. My brother brought his ’08. Tim H. brought his ’07 due to some mechanical problems with his triple white.

Tom brought his 2013.

It occurred to me that I think we really need to encourage everyone who considers themselves a supporter of TripleWhiteFox.com to pre-register next year and specify this as their club. It doesn’t matter that the car being shown is not a feature car, or a fox-body or a Mustang, for that matter. I was very flattered to see cars around the show field with us as their club. We just might get to the 25 car free tent threshold with enough friends of TWF.

Saturday night was the third annual parade and street party. We got an earlier start than last year to get in line and avoided a little of the traffic jam to get off of the show field.

It was a nice drive into downtown Carlisle. I gave my son the option to sit up front. Normally, he has to ride in the back. While we were waiting to go he asked me if it was OK for him to be in the front. He asked a couple times before he decided he wanted to sit in back. He definitely has my tendency to be conservative. On the other hand, his cousin had no problem with riding up front.

Sunday was all about the awards list. Both Amy H. and Mike P. won in our class! Amy won first and Mike won third. There were some nice cars in our class which meant competition was strong. Both awards were well deserved as both cars were the cleanest and best presented that I have seen them.

Going around and talking with people I had two occurrences of being recognized from my picture in the recent Fox Mustang Magazine. It made me feel really nice. The magazine was again there selling subscriptions which I thought was brave of them considering their recent track record of delivering issues. I really want them to survive and encourage everyone to subscribe. Even if they were to go to quarterly (a hint to them) I still would have a high opinion of their efforts.

The ironic thing is that I wanted to renew but couldn’t. I saw Mike on Sunday morning on his way to re-up his subscription at their tent. I joined him thinking I would gladly part with $20 to support them and, in return, would be veryhappy with a renewal and a free t-shirt. When we got to their tent, we found it empty as they had already left the show. The guys at the tent next to theirs said they had packed up on Saturday. This seems weird for a struggling magazine. They lost our two renewals.

That’s it for 2013. See you next year!