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Immediately after restoring his Morgan, Peter Egan decided the best way to break it in was a road trip.

AS THE CAR FERRY BAYFIELD approached Madeline Island harbor, Barb and I descended from the observation deck and headed back to the Morgan. We were first in line to disembark and didn’t want to hold up the show.

This story originally appeared in the February, 2019 issue of R&T - Ed.

A woman climbing into a nearby minivan said, “That’s a beautiful old car! And I think it’s so cute that you two have a good, old-fashioned paper map!”

I smiled wonderingly and said, “Well, I guess it all fits together!”

Then I examined the Wisconsin state map I held. It was a 2008 edition with a picture of a former governor and his wife on the cover. Old-fashioned? I guess it was. But then so was our route. Laid out in yellow Magic Marker, it was a jagged path of mostly secondary roads—and no interstates—that took us from our rural home in southern Wisconsin over to the Mississippi; up the Great River Road to the St. Croix River; west to Forest Lake, Minnesota; and then along Lake Superior to the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.

Madeline is the largest of the Apostle Islands, and the only one with ferry access and a couple of roads on which a Morgan could be driven. Also, the human inhabitants on the island were said to outnumber the bears. Two of those humans are our old friends Patrick and Judy Sebranek, who had invited us to stay with them at their lakefront home for a couple of days.

This little jaunt was the inaugural run for our 1965 Morgan Plus 4, whose restoration I’d just finished that week, after lavishing three years of serious garage time on the project. We’d left with only about 50 test miles on the car, and I suspected our friends back home were wondering how far we’d go before trouble set in. I was curious myself.

I’d found the Morgan in the fall of 2014 as a partially restored hulk at a restoration shop in Fort Collins, Colorado, where the previous owner had abandoned the project during the 2008 financial meltdown. It sat languishing in a back corner, covered with old boxes and dust. It had no dashboard, wiring harness, gas tank, clutch, or weather gear. The windshield (lying in the footwell) was cracked, and the grille was dented.

Beneath the dusty clutter, however, lurked a new factory steel frame and a new wood and steel body shell, painted primer gray and bolted loosely in place. There were two Weber carbs, still in the box, and a much sought-after Gemmer left-hand-drive steering box. The rear axle and Triumph TR4-A engine had been rebuilt, and a Super Sport–style air scoop had already been welded into the bonnet. And the price was very, very right. The shop just wanted the thing outta there after almost seven years of storage.

So I returned to Colorado ASAP with a borrowed trailer and hauled this glittering prize back to Wisconsin, with the help of my buddy Jeff Craig. Jeff is an ardent Morgan buff who could see salvation and order under all that chaos. I could, too. That’s what’s wrong with us. And why I spent the next three years in my garage.

But I must say that I’ve never enjoyed restoring a car quite so much. There’s a lot of wood in a Morgan (though not as much as many people think), and its organic nature reminded me of working on an old wooden sailboat my dad and I once restored, a gaff-rigged Palmer Johnson C-scow. (If the Morgan were a boat, it too would be gaff-rigged.) It’s a truly coachbuilt car, without too many fixed points in space, where the position of a part may depend on its relationship with the part next to it, so assembling the thing feels like a craft rather than a chore. Yes, all very Zen-like, with much filing and fitting, and the project got me happily through three long winters with only a few outbursts of cursing.

And luckily, when I was too dim to figure something out, I could call Larry and Linda Eckler, who own a parts and restoration business called Morgan Spares Ltd., in Copake, New York. To quote the insurance ad, they know a thing or two because they’ve seen a thing or two. So if you want to know the correct position of the nylon gear in the wiper motor, they can tell you. And they’ve got one in stock. I bought most of my parts from them.

My friends at Marklein Auto Body in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, who have painted my last six or seven restoration projects, did the paint and bodywork. Denny Marklein and I settled on a dark Aston Martin British Racing green, a slightly more lustrous shade of the original Morgan BRG. Which, incidentally, was almost exactly the same paint code as my 1991 Special Edition BRG Miata. Doug Stanek did the body repair and Terrence Bauer the paint, both artists of their craft.

A year ago, the car was nicely painted, needing only the top installed to go on its maiden voyage.

I took a short test drive and the oil pressure dropped like a stone—24 psi hot, instead of the recommended 75 psi. Bad news. You’d really rather have most of your teeth extracted than pull the engine back out of a finished Morgan. Which involves taking half the car apart.

But last winter—after a short time-out for abject despair—I pulled the engine, took it down to the bare block, and rebuilt the thing myself. A former mechanic at the Colorado shop (fired long ago, I was told) had installed 0.010-under rod bearings on a 0.020-under crank. Apparently, he was out of Plastigage. Also, the oil holes on the cam bearings were misaligned.

Last spring I reinstalled the engine, now with the miracle of oil pressure. My neighbor and former boss Chris Beebe worked his occult magic on balancing the twin Webers; a shop called Jim’s Upholstery fitted the top, tonneau, and door panels; and we were ready to go on our long-planned “Visiting Friends Who Own Sailboats, Canoes & Guitars Tour.”

Last Sunday morning we finally hit the road. Loading our two soft duffel bags into the small open luggage well, we left with the top down under hot, sunny August skies.

An hour later the heavens turned an angry greenish-black, so we stopped at a gas station to install our new, never-used top and side curtains. This was about a 15-minute job, similar to erecting a mountain tent at Camp 4 on Everest with the monsoons closing in. Or assembling a set of bookshelves from Ikea without instructions.

About a minute later we hit pouring rain and high winds, with tree branches blowing across the road, so I swerved into the drive-thru shelter of the Peoples Community Bank of Arena (closed Sundays) to wait out the storm. Our floor panels were five-ply marine plywood with three coats of spar varnish, but I didn’t want to test their nautical pedigree this early in the trip.

When the sky cleared, Barb consulted her iPhone radar and announced, “Clear sailing all the way to Forest Lake!” So we turned north into the scenic land of high ridges, deep valleys, red barns, and winding roads known as the Driftless Area. At last, my first real chance to sit back and experience the Morgan in its element.

First impressions? The ride quality, which had been pretty harsh during my first test drives, had calmed down remarkably with just a bit of added weight—full tank of gas, spare tire, weather gear, jack, tools, luggage, lead knockoff hammer, etc. Suddenly it had a hunkered-down feeling of heft and nicely damped spring motion. It helped that the new SS-style factory bucket seats I’d installed (recommended by several veterans of the standard bench seat) added some legroom and were almost orthopedically comfortable.

Also, the steering was a revelation: quick but linear, with no on-center sloppiness, and the car stayed manta-ray flat in corners. The Morgan’s sliding-pillar front suspension provides fixed camber and caster, with no funny contact patch changes to mess up steering feedback, so the handling is consistently good at all speeds. An easy car to slide through corners and steer with the throttle, for those feeling feisty or well insured. The TR-4-style Girling front disc brakes stopped hard and felt almost . . . modern.

The only real anachronism was the half-synchro Moss gearbox, which is a fairly precise unit but doesn’t like to be rushed. Timing is everything, as the comedian said, crunching his gears. You learn to match revs and work on your heel-and-toe technique. When I rebuilt this box, it struck me as a hefty relic from the Industrial Revolution, a unit that would have been right at home running a four-speed loom at a woolen mill in Leeds.

At La Crosse, we turned up Highway 35 along the Mississippi, crossed into Minnesota at Prescott, swung up the St. Croix, and were soon pulling up to the Forest Lake home of our friend Doug Harper, whose front yard looks out on a nice dock and sailboat.

We had a great visit with Doug but did not sail, because the wind suddenly died upon our arrival. This has happened on previous visits, so Doug now calls me “Doldrums Egan.” Without sailing, we were forced to canoe, grill fish, play guitar, drink gin and tonics, and watch the sun go down over the lake.

Swinging back into Wisconsin the next day, we hummed through pine forests with the Morgan cruising serenely in its sweet zone of 60 to 70 mph (3000–3700 rpm) and the big 2.2-liter inline-four running like a clock. Okay, an older English clock with steel gears, like Big Ben. Nothing digital here. Evening found us at the beautiful-yet-rustic lakefront home of Jeff and Nancy Craig, near Iron River.

Jeff once owned and restored a Morgan Plus 4 like mine and drove it cross-country many times from Philadelphia to college in Superior, Wisconsin. Yes, even in winter. He said it was dead reliable and the only car he wishes he hadn’t sold. “Morgans are simply wonderful cars,” he told me on our drive back from Colorado with my project car.

Of course, Jeff also owns three vintage Velocette motorcycles, a classic Herreshoff 12∏ wooden sailboat, a wooden steam launch, and about 10 vintage wooden canoes, so he may be a delusional romantic like me, whose opinions are suspect.

We spent a day exploring the charming port city of Bayfield, then left early the next morning to catch the 8:45 Madeline Island ferry and beat the Friday tourist rush. The ramp dropped in the little town of La Pointe, one of the oldest French trading posts in North America, and we were greeted by Pat and Judy Sebranek, old friends from my high school years. They led us back to their beautifully restored home on the south shore, where we parked the dusty, intrepid Morgan in their garage/guitar room/ art studio. They gave us a tour of the island, took us to a grilled local whitefish dinner at a waterfront restaurant, and then we retired to their patio to contemplate the lake over margaritas.

As we sat watching the evening light fade on Lake Superior, I was reminded of a line from one of Kurt Vonnegut’s last books. He said that as he got older, he found himself more and more often looking around himself in the midst of some pleasant circumstance and saying, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

It’s a line I’ve found useful many times in recent years, and it came up every day on this trip. Even while driving the Morgan back home.

We took two days cruising home through Wisconsin, and I never got tired of that view down the long, louvered bonnet, set against the pines and green hills and winding country roads. When we pulled into our driveway, we’d gone 1028 miles, used 1.5 quarts of oil, and averaged 21.6 mpg. Remarkably, we’d completed the trip without ever opening the tool kit. Not so much as a screwdriver was needed.

I think some cars have a soul, and the Morgan was grateful to be back on the road.