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"Those who live in the upper Midwest may find this hard to credit, but my wife Barbara and I drive a convertible with the top down here in Wisconsin more often than we did during the decade we lived in California\u2014even with five months off for winter storage.   &amp;quot;How can this be?&amp;quot; you ask, naturally doubtful. Well, we lived near the coast in Southern California, where the sea air made it quite chilly in the evening and the bright sunlight made it a little too hot if you got stuck in traffic during the day. Easier to leave the top up. We did have some wonderful top-down drives in that state, however, cruising up the Coast Highway through Big Sur, or just driving our MGB down to Laguna Beach for breakfast, with the palm trees waving in the golden sand along the crashing surf...   Where was I? Ah yes, stuck in the upper Midwest, but still driving convertibles\u2014a Jaguar XK8, in this case. And I must admit that our midday heat this year was no more convertible-friendly than California&amp;#039;s.   This was simply one of the hottest summers in memory. Walking out of the house was like stepping into a pizza oven, so the Jag&amp;#039;s top often stayed up and the air got turned on. Evenings were a little better, but I found the best time to use a convertible was in the cool of morning, starting before dawn in near-darkness.   Fine, you say, but what kind of crazy person would get up at such an hour, just to drive a convertible?   My kind, and I found plenty of almost-sane excuses to do so this past summer.   First, there&amp;#039;s my friend Tom Schmock. Tom and his family own a bar called the Blue Moon, and also a famous steakhouse in Madison called Smoky&amp;#039;s. The restaurant is named for Tom&amp;#039;s late father, a Navy pilot in World War II, and there are lots of historic aviation photos on the walls. Also excellent martinis at the bar, although they seem to make me confused, in an odd, blissful way that involves intense spiritual visions and searing insights, later forgotten. Maybe it&amp;#039;s the alcohol.   Tom is a huge car buff with a weakness for Alfas (which, in turn, have their own weaknesses) and Formula 1. And every time there&amp;#039;s one of those o-dark-early live Grand Prix telecasts on Sunday morning, he invites about 25 of his closest car-buff pals over to the Blue Moon to watch the race on the bar&amp;#039;s three gigantic screens\u2014any one of which makes my parents&amp;#039; 1955 DuMont TV set look like a wristwatch.   His chef comes in and makes breakfast for everyone while Tom slings a coffeepot and hands out Bloody Marys. The breakfasts are always matched to the nationality of the GP\u2014Hungarian goulash, German sausage and potatoes... I can&amp;#039;t remember what he had for the British GP. I don&amp;#039;t think you can give away cold, pale toast; kippers; and fried tomato slices in this country. Maybe it was a good curry.   Regardless, the food is always superb and he does all this for free, so I have absolutely no trouble setting my alarm clock for 5:30 a.m. as I go to bed on a Saturday night. I usually anticipate the alarm&amp;#039;s dulcet tones by about five minutes, bound out of bed, back the Jag out of the garage, lower the top, and head for the Blue Moon.   This is a 25-mile drive, mostly on winding country roads with farms, horse pastures, forests, and green hills, all lit by an almost-risen sun. And when the sun finally breaks through and hits the treetops, it&amp;#039;s a moment only Beethoven could express musically. Or maybe Gordon MacRae.   Now, I suppose it&amp;#039;s possible for a person to be more cheerful than I am on these mornings, but I don&amp;#039;t know how. If you can think of something, send me a card. Top down on a country road at dawn, headed for an F1 breakfast with friends. It always makes me ask the famous Kurt Vonnegut question, &amp;quot;What could be nicer than this?&amp;quot;   But a few other early drives have made this a good convertible summer, too. One is a cars-and-coffee gathering I often attend on Saturdays in the town of Verona, near Madison. It&amp;#039;s held at a little coffee shop, with strict rules that the meeting end at exactly 9:00 a.m., even if someone&amp;#039;s in the middle of a sentence. That way you don&amp;#039;t linger and &amp;quot;waste&amp;quot; your whole Saturday, when you could be Roto-Rooting a drain or taking trash to the dump.   Another great dawn-patrol moment occurred just last week, when my friend Dr. Tony Buechler called. Tony flies a beautiful P-51 Mustang called Petie II out of the Waukesha Airport, near Milwaukee. Fortunately, this airplane has a rear passenger seat where the auxiliary gas tank used to be, and Tony sometimes invites me along for a ride\u2014when he isn&amp;#039;t buzzing our house and shivering our timbers with that big Merlin V-12.   Anyway, Tony called and said, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m flying from Waukesha to Willow Run, Michigan, tomorrow with my friend Bernie in his Bonanza. I need to pick up my P-51 at Jack Roush&amp;#039;s shop, where they&amp;#039;re fixing an oil leak in the supercharger. Jack has a couple of P-51s himself, so we may do some terrorizing of the skies above Michigan. You want to go along? We need to leave around 7:00 from Waukesha, so you&amp;#039;d have to drive over pretty early in the morning.&amp;quot;   Pretty early in the morning\u2014as we have seen\u2014is no problem for this convertible owner, so I left our house at 5:00 a.m. and drove the back roads to Waukesha. Beautiful dawn, with small pockets of cool morning fog that absolutely mandated I wear my old leather flying jacket from my Piper Cub days. I&amp;#039;d had cataract surgery and lens replacement just two days earlier, and could finally see without glasses. To celebrate, I&amp;#039;d bought a new pair of real, non-prescription Ray-Bans.   I know what you&amp;#039;re thinking: What an incredibly cool guy! And marginally more youthful looking, too!   Tony&amp;#039;s Bonanza-pilot friend Bernie turned out to be Dr. B. Rhomberg, M.D. (Notice how I&amp;#039;m the only person in this scene without a medical degree? Or an airplane?) Long story short, we flew over Lake Michigan to Willow Run Airport, home of Ford&amp;#039;s old B-24 Liberator factory. There we shook hands with Jack Roush, a pleasant and modest man who just happens to own an industrial empire that builds most of the world&amp;#039;s winning stock-car engines, rebuilds Rolls-Royce Merlins, and manufactures many, many other things.   Jack climbed into a P-51 called Gentleman Jim, I got into the back seat of Tony&amp;#039;s Mustang, and we spent the next hour in close formation, flying and mock-dogfighting over the Michigan countryside. Both these guys, I must say, can really fly. It was like watching World War II gun-camera footage, in color. Without all the flak and tracers.   We had lunch with Jack, and then it was time to fly home. Tony wanted to climb the Mustang to 16,000 feet over Lake Michigan so he could deadstick into the opposite shore in case of mechanical trouble, and he pointed out, rightly, that this pressure change would not be good for my healing eyes. So I flew back with Bernie in the Bonanza, and we got to Waukesha just as a rainstorm hit.   I drove home that evening with the top up on the Jag. It gradually stopped raining, but the clouds moving in had an autumnal, gunmetal-blue tinge to them, and the air was suddenly cooler. There&amp;#039;s always a moment when you can first sense fall in the air, and this was it. That was OK with me; autumn is perhaps the best time here for a convertible. You can drive all day with the top down.   Winter will follow, of course, and then the Jag goes into storage, with the green light of the Battery Tender its only sign of life. But that&amp;#039;s OK, too. I&amp;#039;ve got to do six more months of chemo for hepatitis C this winter, so going out to the workshop and pondering the Jag will help get me through the dark months. I can summon up those summer mornings in Technicolor, remembered clearly through these new eyes. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/travel/features/a18458/convertible-mornings/>