[SEL] European tour

Best, George George_Best at adp.com
Tue Sep 11 07:56:33 PDT 2007


Curt,

Last year a couple people asked me if I'd consider leading a engine tour
after they had heard about my two prior trips to visit collectors and
shows in Europe.

Harry Terpstra and I talked about it some and last winter decided we
would try a small group and see how it went.  We decided we could take 4
people with us, which would make us a group of 6 and fit comfortably in
a 9 passenger van.

During the Spring I routed out a 10 day tour which included the Neunen
engine show and some of the best collections that we had previously
visited in Holland, Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium.  We also located
some collections to visit that Harry and I had not been to previously.

The four collectors that went with me were all from the west coast.
Wayne Thackery, Lauren Langdon, Buzz Stetler, and Les Layton.  Tommy
Turner was originally one of the original four, but was unable to commit
to going or not and gave up his slot to Les.

During the 10 days, we spent part of 3 days at the Nuenen show which I
consider to be the best engine show there is.  It is an engine only show
and I think they had around 700 engines.  While the Portland show is
certainly bigger, you don't see slide valves and other early and rare
engines like you do at Neunen.

Besides the engine show we averaged around 2 collections each day.
These were basically all private collections and we only visited one
public museum (the N. A. Otto birthplace).  The collectors we visited
all have very nice collections of what I consider to be high quality and
rare engines.  Meaning we saw a lot of sideshaft engines and a fair
number of slide valve engines.

This was very much a Hell on Wheels Tour!  Most mornings we started out
early, drove and visited collectors, had a late dinner, got to sleep
around midnight.  Then did the same the next day.

I think we saw something like 21 or 22 collections, attended one show,
had a private tour of a 350 year old brewery in Germany (which included
pizza and all the beer we wanted to drink!), stopped to view the Rhein
Falls, visited the red light district in Amsterdam (Wendel's tour
probably doesn't do that ;-) ).

This year I digitally video taped the Neunen show plus most of the
collections we visited.  I've been working on editing down the tapes to
a reasonable amount of time to put on a DVD.  At some point I'll
probably offer this DVD for a low price.

George

Ps.. There are currently no plans of offering another tour (although I'm
known to be impulsive and change my mind).  I think part of the reason
is that this tour was fantastic and better than originally planed, so it
would be impossible to duplicate again.  Besides I think we'd do some
things different next time as well.



-----Original Message-----
From: sel-bounces at lists.stationary-engine.com
[mailto:sel-bounces at lists.stationary-engine.com] On Behalf Of Curt
Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2007 6:56 AM
To: The SEL email discussion list
Subject: Re: [SEL] I'm back again

Hey George, welcome back. Tell us more about your European tour and
hopefully you have some photos to share.
Curt Holland
Gastonia, NC



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