Flying to San Francisco should be a chore. It's a hell of a long way, I always get the one seat with a busted DVD player and usually find myself in the middle of a line of a jumbo's centre four, the other three taken by members of the Samoan rugby team.
Yet somehow it is never a pain, simply because of what awaits at the other end. Not just San Francisco itself (a wonderful city that we only ever get a couple of hours in and most of that time I am usually ferreting around the Gap for Kids superstore clutching a shopping list provided by my wife), but because it means we are on the threshold of Monterey and Pebble Beach.
That on its own is enough to make the travel bearable, exciting even, but in 2007 I was really itching to get out of the airport and not just to get the fix of nicotine that I had been denied for so many hours.
No, this time Mick Walsh and I weren't jumping in a hire car and heading straight to the peninsula, we had a local call to make first.
To be honest, a visit to the amazing Fantasy Junction in nearby Emeryville would be worth the trip to California on its own, but when you know that something rather special is waiting for you there, it is all the better.
Rather special? Well yes, it would be churlish for me to dismiss all the amazing classics I have been privileged to drive over the years, but amongst the motoring hacks there are certain holy grails and the Monteverdi Hai is just about the holiest of them.
As I rather pretentiously wrote at the time: "Even seeing a Monteverdi Hai is akin to catching a glimpse of the Loch Ness monster… Getting to drive one is the equivalent of riding a unicorn bareback down Brigadoon High Street."
