The Mini is now occupying 40 or so square feet of my driveway, which is to say the trip to Seattle to retrieve it went well, and the car got me home. On first in-person inspection, I was pleasantly surprised at how well the car showed; usually photos hide blemishes but in this case there just weren’t that many to hide. The guy the seller had hired to restore the car was there to walk me through it and take it on a test drive, and I got my first taste of what a hopped up 1275 motor can do when it’s pushing less than 1300 lbs of car. The cliches all hold true: it handled as if it were on rails, and the front wheel drive is a very different animal from the Alfa experience I’m used to.

The Italian Job, including a truck for all that gold. An exercise in contrasts.

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The summer officially began on July 2, my last day of semi-regular employment and first day of a period of vacation and car project activity. The vacation was spent in and around Seattle, which lead me (inevitably) to browse the Seattle craigslist postings in the weeks leading up to the trip. I had a romantic notion of finding something fun and interesting and driving it home, forfeiting the return plane ticket in favor of a fun little ride to complement my current rag-tag assortment of Alfas. I thought about looking at this BMW 2000 sedan, then focused my search on a Dodge A100 van or splittie VW bus. Then the Motherlode 400 happened, and I found myself newly afflicted and looking for a classic Mini, ideally an early MK1 or an Innocenti variant. Any commentary I could make on the appeal of a classic Mini would go into a great pile of redundancy that has been accumulating for over 50 years. What I didn’t want, however, was a car that had been given the usual treatment with Union Jacks or checkered flag motifs adorning otherwise clean panels, billet under the hood, VTEC conversions, etc. I did want something that was more suitable for modern traffic, though, meaning as big an engine as possible, disk brakes, safety belts… What I found was this:

1959 Morris Mini, looking very clean in off-white and black

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