Southern California's Holiday Motor Excursion wraps up the year: Video

It wouldn't be Christmas, New Year's or any of the other things we celebrate around this time without the annual Holiday Motor Excursion put on by the Horseless Carriage Club of America's Southern California Branch. Each year, between Dec. 25 and New Year's Day, a couple hundred cars older than your favorite grandfather drive, putter, wheeze or roar onto the roads in and around Pasadena, Calif., for a daylong road trip into motoring's past in a wheeled testament to mechanical devotion.

The Horseless Carriage Club of America is a repository of automotive history from the earliest days of the invention. Membership in the club is limited to those who have cars built before 1916. That brings out a lot of Locomobiles, Tourists, Pope Hartfords, Stanley Steamers and one of the largest gatherings of Ford Model Ts you'll see all year. For this annual holiday event the club relaxes the model-year requirements a little, sometimes to cars built as late as 1932, by which time a lot of the engineering of this new form of transportation had been more fully sorted out. It's as much fun for the hundreds of spectators who show up at the launch and along the route as it is for the proud owners, drivers and restorers who get a chance to run their projects on the open road.

"This is a gearhead meet for people who have taken antique cars from, in a lot of cases, not much more than dust and, like the phoenix, have turned them into beautiful mechanical pieces of artwork," said Kenny King, event coordinator and SoCal HCCA board member. "We like to display them and show them to the public and educate them about early transportation. At the same time we get to play with our artwork."

The Excursion starts in a parking lot off of Foothill Boulevard in Pasadena ("Pasadena seems to be our unofficial base city," says the club's Web site), then winds up into the hills and around the floodplain of the San Gabriel Mountains. We rode in our friend Harry Hernandez's 1913 Model T Speedster. Hernandez also owns a Model T Touring and a Jeffrey, the latter serving as a reminder of how many car companies there were back in the days when economies of scale were all over the map and there were no Tier 2 supplier networks or government crash-test regulations.

Our T was in great running order, and we whisked through the canyons of Pasadena, Altadena, La Canada (by the Art Center College of Design), the Rose Bowl and San Marino where we passed the Huntington Library, which likewise reminded us that this was where the oil barons and land barons all lived before Beverly Hills had even been invented. There's a donut stop (a requirement for all car-club events), a lunch stop (also required) and a final stop at a club member's home garage before the pack disperses and everybody heads home for another year.

This year the tour ended at the home and garages of Loren Burch, where, each time we visit we want to start working on any of his many old-car restoration projects--or try and start the steam locomotive that once circled the backyard track.

There are other HCCA events all over the country all year long. Have a look at www.hcca.org and go buy yourself a Pope, a Peerless or a Packard.

By Mark Vaughn