Thanks to the wonderful photography of Kenneth Gall, and a bunch of blogging, my London Black Cab got to go to Dallas for a photo shoot with Geof Kern. His assistant got in touch a few weeks back and asked if my taxi could appear on the cover of a magazine. Flattered, and keen to get my cab some more modelling gigs, I said yes.
If you’ve never had a vehicle moved by flatbed towing service from Austin to Dallas, you might not know that it costs $750+ each way. Much more than a Southwest airlines plane ticket. Given that the venerable Kip Motor is also in Dallas, and since I like to complicate my life by wounding two birds with one poorly lobbed missile, my mind started to hatch an ill conceived plan involving many wounded birds in a bush and the stone in the hand.
I had foolishly run out of diesel when my old school buddy and wiley inventor pal Andy Mitchell had come to town, and since running out of fuel is a little complex in a diesel injection system, I decided it would be nice for my cab to stop in at Kip Motor for a little TLC. So that it would, you know, run again.
Being me, I decided to cram everything into a tight and rigid schedule, allowing only a modest time for Ori and I to obtain a big ass truck (F350 turbodiesel with 6 wheels), a 4 wheeled trailer capable of hauling a minivan (the online UHaul booking system didn’t cater for payloads from 1967, so I guessed at minivan), and then pushing the 4500lbs of British Steel onto the contraption. Because it didn’t start any more, even after liberal application of diesel and threats.
Predictably, loading took longer than expected, and we arrived in Dallas later than anticipated. I was more than a little glad that Kip himself came to help his service manager Iain out on the simple (to them) task of bleeding the air from the fuel pump and injectors. Ten minutes of wrenching and the beast roared into life. I was audibly shaken. Hear below.
Ori got the quick tour of the British car restoration shop, and with a new (used) hub cap in place, we set off with our trailer full of eye-candy to find a hotel. Sometimes I like to plan, sometimes I don’t and it bites me. So arriving in uptown Dallas with 40 feet of machinery looking for a parking spot while starving didn’t do much to settle my nerves, but it all worked out in the end. The car got a hotel room in the Best Western with it’s lavish and remote parking. Ori and I got to pimp it uptown at the Adolphus. We chose it mainly as my travel app claimed that it was built partially to resemble a Budweiser bottle. I didn’t see it myself, but the robes were nice.
Next day brought us to a photo shoot where no less than 14 people were busy when we returned from taking a nap. The driver for the shoot was a surgeon by day, the clothes horse in the back was a model by careful daily eschewal of cheeseburgers. The dozen other folk were holding things (including a butterfly on a stick), looking at things in tents, talking about exposure and such, and attending to the model’s face, makeup and hair. It made me wonder how I ever manage to take a photo of anything on my own. Then I remembered. No-one asks me to put my photos on the cover of a magazine.
Putting the taxi back on the trailer under its own power was a cinch, and before I knew it, the adventure was almost over. Save for a long drive back to Austin with our 14 wheels of fury. Amidst chats to Ori, and the rush of a 5 hour energy drink, I kept thinking of the first magnetic audio tape I ever bought – the soundtrack to Convoy. If you think of the lyrics, it turns out that Shaky Town is San Francisco. Makes sense when you think about it.
The trip was a fun exercise in ridiculousness – spending $1,000+ to take a car 450 miles for a single photo. It was nothing to do with my day job, and I got to meet some interesting folk who like what they do. It also brought me closer to my old taxi, and made me think twice about selling it. Especially when I got an email from someone else wanting to use it in a movie. It’s fun to have a little whimsy to counteract the searing dullness of driving a Prius every day.
On that note, I’m still planning on selling the cab, after I satiate my 23 month old son’s desire to drive in “Daddy’s choo choo car” a few more times. After it’s gone, I’m going to fulfill a long held ambition to drive an Ariel Atom around a track, courtesy of Lone Star Exotics.
Let them truckers roll 10-4.
[edit] Oh, and here’s part of the Nieman Marcus shot – I scanned part of The Book from August 2012. Please don’t sue me. Think of it as free advertising, though it has to be said, more people are probably looking at the model than the car.
