<VV> California?

[Alan and Clare Wesson]

> Can't help but see the irony. The state that just about  invented hot 
> rods,
> the best possible climate in most of the state to  preserve autos,  And 
> the
> most pin headed, destructive to the hobby  laws in the US.

Actually, in my (not inconsiderable) experience of registering cars in the 
USA, but from the point of an 'undesirable alien', the nightmare place to 
try to do it was New York. I tried to register the first American car I ever 
bought in Manhattan, and although I ultimately succeeded it was a TOTAL 
nightmare (I nearly got arrested twice, for querying the (incorrect, I now 
know!) statements of hatchet-faced apparatchiks at various offices, and took 
nearly a week, during the whole of which I had the plateless car parked in a 
valet car park @ $40 a day just off Broadway and 53rd, and was unable to 
move it).

When I asked my friends there why it was so difficult, the universal 
reaction was that I was an idiot, and should have taken the car to NJ to 
register it.

I will say, however, that the MV bureaucracy everywhere in the USA ('land of 
the free') is WAY worse than the bureaucracy over here - and ours is bad 
enough. The worst I have yet experienced, though (out of USA, UK, France and 
Italy) is France. Just don't even think about it...

Cheers

Alan