Okay, I am back in the States after more than a week in England. It was a great trip, but it turned out to be much more work oriented than I expected.

I hope to have pictures up within the week, but I thought I’d share one of the highlights of the trip. I was staying with Jonathan Sartin, one of the people I work with on the OpenNMS project. He lives north of London out in the countryside. Hidden in his garage was a Caterham 21 (Caterham with a long “a”, like to serve food at a wedding). Now the Caterham 7 is a well known open-wheeled roadster very famous on the race track, but I’d never heard of the 21. This was Caterham’s attempt at a standard production car, but since the Lotus Elise came out about the same time, demand wasn’t what they had hoped and only about 50 were made.

Here is a nice picture of the car with Edward Sartin (age 3.5) at the wheel.

You do not ride in this car as much as wear it. Like other British cars I’ve been in, the tunnels are quite narrow. You sit very low in the seats (the sill comes up higher than your waist), and you have to be a bit of an acrobat to get over the 9 inch door sill. Apparently due to their other car being out of commission, Kathy Sartin had to get into the 21 when she was 8 and a half months pregnant. It’s the only car I’ve ever felt claustrophobic in, as my knees were almost touching and one shoulder was on the door and the other against Jonathan’s shoulder.

We went for a ride on the narrow, winding, country lanes around Gobblecote. It was a nice day, and the exhaust note of the 21 is musical. I love riding in an open car, and for some reason this reminded me of the scene in A Clockwork Orange when Alex and his droogs went off in search of a little ultraviolence, without the whole violence bit.

Jonathan slowed when we came up behind an MG-TD that was out enjoying probably the last nice weekend before winter. There was no rush and no need to overtake it – just two distinct generations of British automotive engineering, sharing the road.

We parted ways with the MG when Jonathan exited onto the motorway. In less than six seconds we were doing over 110 mph. The 1.6L 4 cylinder was a lot more powerful that one would expect, and I can imagine how the car would perform without my extra 220 pounds weighing it down.

It was the perfect end to a great trip, and the 21 is a beautiful car.