USA 2016 – Travel Diary – Day 09
USA 2016 – Travel Diary – Day 09
Day 9: CJ PONY PARTS
Another perfect day
“The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.” Nelson Henderson
I always dreamed about how a proper American performance car parts would look like; I bought online from many of them, without visiting physically any shop till 2009, when I stepped in STEEDA autosports. I was so impressed. I promised to myself that I will have to visit other shops in my next trips.
We decided to write an e-mail to CJ Pony Parts before we left Italy; surprisingly we have been able to set a tour of the shop and its facilities for our trip. To enjoy even more our visit , we decided to involve also the Mustang Club of Central Pennsylvania. With more than 200 Members, is one of the biggest clubs of Pennsylvania State.
After a quick breakfast in our Hotel, we drove several hours from Pittsburgh to Harrisburg, where CJ is located. We had the secretary from the club waiting us over there. We share the same passion for the S-197, Torch Red, GT, stick shift.
The Warm welcome from the CJ crew was amazing. Our special guide has been Bill Tumas. We always saw him on youtube, doing video tutorials for the CJ Pony Parts YouTube channel; having him available as a tourist guide has been simply unbelievable. After a quick visit of the storage(where we made some shopping, of course!), we moved to the main offices, where All the sales goes through; we moved inside the mechanical shop and stepped in the video-making area that we saw in many videos. The last part of our tour was something uncommon: we had access to the scrapyard of CJ Pony parts! Many mustang from all the generations are dying there, disassembled (the good parts are stored inside containers, don’t worry!); many of them came from crashes or have been abandoned somewhere. We understood that CJ was selling also used vintage parts before (they are not doing this anymore). This was my second visit to a old car scrapyard, that kind of scrapyard we could only see in the movies!
After some videos and pictures, we left CJ and drove to the hotel.
We had plans for the evening: we had to meet the guys of the nome club. Meet people from other clubs is amazing: you could share stories, experiences and advices. This is one of the things I enjoy to do when I travel around the world. Having more friends is something that let you feel less alone when you travel. After several beers and a nice dinner we exchanged our t-shirts and gadgets, as tradition asks.
We went to bed quite early, conscious that closing the luggage the day after would be absolutely a nightmare.
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