Sunday morning, with the party out of the way, and a hang over both real and figuratively, I set about to get things moving again. Shortly after lunch Jon from Caterham USA called and let me know the red car I had should be in New Jersey. That made it highly probably the gentleman in NJ had mine. The NJ car hadn’t been delivered yet so it wasn’t confirmed, but given the similarities in the build numbers it was a good guess they’d been swapped accidentally and mine was up there. That was somewhat relieving; NJ is a lot closer than Seattle. Or Brazil. Or Canada. Jon apologized, but like I said, it wasn’t really his fault. Accidents happen and we both knew Caterham would make it right. Frustrating yes, disappointing yes, but there are far more important things in life than having your third sports car be a different color than what you expected. And it didn’t ruin the party at all – everyone still had a great time – and to me that’s what was important.

After talking to Jon I went down to the garage for a bit to confirm there weren’t any more boxes labeled with the wrong numbers and to start doing an inventory. I spent about an hour down there, opening miscellaneous boxes and didn’t find anything but stuff for mine. That was good news, at least it was just a simple chassis swap rather than searching for all kinds of other goodies too. One interesting item I found, is a box labeled ‘French 14358’ with a set of harnesses in it. From reading Daniel French’s build blog (www.caterhamr500.co.uk) I remembered seeing something about his harnesses not showing up and getting some odd color combo instead; I wonder if somehow I ended up with his harnesses since our crates should have been getting assembled about the same time. It’s a small world after all – will have to shoot him an email and see if that’s indeed his build number.

I also cleaned up the garage and organized things a tiny bit. I had a number of tools scattered around from the box opening process the day before so straightened those all out. Also took out the trash and re-stocked the beer fridge since it had been raided pretty heavily during the party.

Once satisfied the garage was in decent enough shape I took the afternoon to go sit by the pool; it was exactly what the doctor ordered.

Daniel