The Great Cannonball® Sign Heist: A Cannonball Tale

So there I was, playing responsible citizen and all-around good guy, slapping up signs around Darien like some demented municipal volunteer advertising our Cars & Coffee season opener. April 13th was the date—a perfectly reasonable Sunday morning for civilized people to gather their motorized mistresses and engage in caffeinated automotive foreplay at the very spot where the last real Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash had launched into automotive immortality back in ’79.

One of these signs—a modest rectangle of corrugated plastic bearing news of our impending motorized congregation—found its way to the exit of Goodwives Shopping Center. Nothing fancy, mind you. Just basic advertising for what any rational human being would consider a wholesome gathering of like-minded gearheads and their four-wheeled obsessions.

April 5th rolled around, and like any red-blooded American, I found myself trudging to the post office, that cathedral of bureaucratic inefficiency nestled within the bowels of Goodwives. As I emerged from this temple of governmental incompetence, I discovered something that made my blood pressure spike faster than a small-block Chevy hitting the nitrous: my goddamn sign had vanished. Disappeared. Gone without so much as a tire mark or a apologetic note.

My initial reaction, being a man of reasonable temperament and charitable disposition, was to blame some pearl-clutching suburban zealot—probably the type who calls the cops when teenagers dare to drive faster than the posted suggestions masquerading as speed limits. Clearly, some overly sensitive neighbor had experienced a full-blown case of automotive anxiety at the mere thought of internal combustion engines gathering near their precious McMansion.

So I did what any self-respecting automotive enthusiast would do: I put up another damn sign and muttered dark imprecations about the decline of American automotive appreciation.

Then, a week later, the universe decided to demonstrate that reality can be considerably more entertaining than fiction. An email arrived bearing photographic evidence that my purloined sign had somehow materialized at the Tail of the Dragon in North Carolina—that serpentine ribbon of asphalt beloved by motorcyclists, sports car drivers, and other practitioners of high-speed therapy.

North Carolina? What in the name of Dan Gurney’s ghost was going on here?

Now, as any card-carrying member of the automotive cognoscenti knows, Cars & Coffee Darien occupies sacred ground—the very launching pad of the final legitimate Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash in 1979. But what the casual observer might not realize is that the spirit of that glorious, completely illegal, and utterly necessary protest against automotive oppression never truly died.

No sir. Ever since that last official run, bands of automotive anarchists—spiritual descendants of the original Cannonball runners—have been staging their own coast-to-coast adventures. These modern-day pirates of the interstate highway system, inspired by either the original races or that cinematic bastardization starring Burt Reynolds, continue to prove that good drivers in good automobiles can traverse this great nation faster than any rational transportation planner would dare imagine.

Sometimes these contemporary expressions of automotive rebellion commence at the Red Ball Garage in Manhattan—that hallowed starting point of the original madness. But occasionally, when the moon is right and the automotive gods are feeling particularly mischievous, they begin their transcontinental assault from the loading dock behind the old Lock, Stock & Barrel restaurant in Darien.

And that’s precisely what unfolded on the morning of April 5th, 2025. As these modern-day desperados prepared to fling themselves across the American landscape in pursuit of whatever passes for automotive enlightenment these days, they committed an act of theft that would have made the original Cannonball runners proud: they liberated my Cars & Coffee sign and conscripted it into their cross-country adventure.

What followed can only be described as the Great American Sign Tour of 2025. Defaced with the signatures of its captors—a practice that would have horrified municipal sign ordinance officials from sea to shining sea—this humble piece of corrugated plastic embarked on a journey that most Americans only dream about.

From the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach, California, where it no doubt witnessed the kind of automotive debauchery that makes insurance companies weep, to the serpentine glory of the Tail of the Dragon, where it probably observed motorcycles and sports cars engaged in the sort of high-speed ballet that terrifies safety bureaucrats. It surfaced at the Saint Louis Gateway National Park, paid homage at the Bonneville Salt Flats—that great white altar of land speed records—and meandered through the Winnemucca Sand Dunes in Nevada, where off-road enthusiasts practice their own brand of mechanical mayhem.