"Car d'Alene"

1956 Ford Victoria at "Car" d'Alene

Every year around the middle of June the city of Coeur d'Alene, ID is host to one of America's biggest vintage car shows, which is called "Car" d'Alene.  It is held near the Lake Coeur d'Alene Resort.  This year the dates for the car show are June 15-16.  Since we are only about 40 minutes away we decided to head into Coeur d'Alene Friday, June 15th, afternoon and spend the afternoon "oohing and awing" at the pre 1971 vehicles of all makes and models on display.


A few days ago we took the top off the T-Bird, and decided that today was a good day to lower the rag top and enjoy the wind in our hair as we motored eastbound on I-90 over to the Idaho border.  We exited I-90 at 4th Street and headed toward the Lake Resort area, and ended up parking in the city parking lot on the west side of the Resort complex.....this was a very fortuitous decision for later in the early evening when we decided to leave, as it was just outside the area the police had cordoned off for the parade of cars which would rumble east on Sherman.  The parking in this city lot is not free, and there is a ticket machine you must either insert the EXACT change ($1.00 per hour), or a credit card to pay IN ADVANCE for your parking space.  The problem was this machine's card reader was not functioning so people were scrambling to find EXACT CHANGE to pay for their parking.  A process that should have taken 2-3 minutes per person took around 10 minutes per person due to the machine's extremely slow processing time.  

Ultimately we were able to exchange money for a parking ticket and were on our way walking to Sherman Street.  The weather was balmy, and very sunny.....very few clouds, which we are finding is unusual for this area.....instead of referring to "rain showers" they talk about "sun showers" here.  As we walked down Sherman it became obvious that we needed to find a sidewalk cafe to "camp out" at while we awaited the start of the parade....it was around 3pm, and the parade start time was sometime around 6pm.  We found a perfect spot at Splash - Liquid Entertainment which had several tables outside with a perfect view of the parade venue.  We ordered a pitcher of Mac and Jack's African Amber beer, and some Tempura Asparagus (yum, and yum!), and settled in to wait for the parade.  There was no shortage of cool vintage vehicles doing a pre-parade loop around the downtown area, and we got a few pictures.

Around 6:15pm the parade began, and there were literally hundreds of cars driving down the parade route, and there was no end to the "OOHS AND AWS" reverberating up and down the parade route, not to mention a few "burnouts", and a few guys letting us hear how cool their exhaust systems sounded.


Splash is also a sports bar, so they had the U.S. Open Gold Tournament on several of their large TV's.  I walked back and forth from our table to the bar area a number of times to see who was on top of the leader board over the course of the afternoon.  We hung around until around 7:30pm, and then decided to head "home", but not before stopping off to visit our Coeur d'Alene friends, George and Brenda, for about 30 minutes.


That was our Friday, and a nice day it was, indeed!


Thanks for stopping by!