If you are any one of 82 Ferrari owners and it's a Thursday and you don't have to be doing whatever it is that lets you afford a car that costs around $300,000, then the merest reason, just the soup�on of an idea, is excuse enough.

In the case of the 82 Ferrari aficionados, it was the 60th anniversary of Ferrari (1947 to 2007) that gave them reason enough to gather in the parking lot of San Francisco's St. Francis Yacht Club recently -- a colorful group of cars, predominantly red, with a sprinkling of silver, cream, burgundy, navy blue and even fly yellow.

The true exercise of the day was to caravan across the Golden Gate Bridge under police motorcycle escort -- imagine it! Eighty-two Ferraris lined up, nose to tail, growling along the bridge and up into Marin County. Then they snaked up through country roads to Bodega Bay, where the tifosi, as Ferrari fans are known, had some light refreshment and returned to Ferrari & Maserati of San Francisco in Mill Valley for some serious refreshment and a crab cake or two.

(The Chronicle, in the spirit of participatory journalism and a true effort to cover the story from the ground up, went along in a newish and quite reddish Ferrari F430 Spider, which is Italianese for convertible.)

Ferrari, the company, is a study in polite restraint. It sells only about 5,500 cars a year (of which some 1,600 are sold to customers in the United States). Yes, Ferrari is a genuine member of the upper crust in cardom, that sanctum of exclusive (read: expensive) autos that go to the cost-is-no-object owner. No, Ferrari does not do a lot of promotional events because, frankly, they don't have to. As a Ferrari official once told me, they just do enough to keep the aspiration alive, to keep the name in the eyes of the public.

And many of those eyes had drifted to the parking lot to have a look at the Italian iron before it took off. There was even a visiting Ducati 999 Superbike, an $18,000 motorcycle that some think of as a two-wheeled Ferrari. The car owners ogled the bike, clucked approvingly and then climbed into the cars and fired up their engines.

In this cavalcade there were a couple of cars that stood out in the pack, and one of them was a new dark red Ferrari 599 Fiorano coupe. These cars cost $270,484 each and they are not easy to get. Those who want them frequently have to wait a while -- up to years -- to get one. But not Howard Dickstein, a Sacramento lawyer who has been driving Ferraris for more than 10 years and is on good enough terms with the San Francisco dealer that he can get a new car almost the way you can buy a new Honda Civic, which means right now.

Dickstein, 62, has a law practice representing a number of California Indian tribes. With him on Ferrari day was his wife, Jeannine English, a member of the California State Bar Board of Governors. She drives an Aston Martin Vantage.

Dickstein is one of those owners who said he buys Ferraris simply because he loves them.

"Some people who own Ferraris are dilettantes, or they buy them as investments," he said. "These are cars I drive."

"I bought this car March 15," he said, standing next to his Fiorano. "It's the best combination of performance, handling and comfort of any car I've ever owned. The power is scintillating. There's all that detail in the styling" -- his hands lightly flow down the car's roof -- "look at these flying buttresses."

"This car has a highly sophisticated sound system, not that I've used it very much. The car has a music of its own that I never tire of."

Dickstein said he has been in love with sports cars since he was a teenager, growing up in Philadelphia. "I was in Boston later on, and I saw a Ferrari 250 GT from the early 1960s. It was so elegant," he said. But at the time, he was buying down market -- "I had an original Mini Cooper, then Alfa-Romeos, Porsches." Dickstein took a law degree from Villanova University, then another from England's Cambridge University, where he taught for a while.

All the while, he was following the car side of his life, watching Formula One races and the like. And how many Ferraris has he had? "Let's see, I had two 355s, two 360s, a 456 and a 430 coupe."

The Ferraris motor at a fairly civilized, non-Highway-Patrol-attracting pace up U.S. 101 to Lucas Valley Road in Marin County, where they turn off and head for Bodega Bay. Along the side of the road, small groups of people wave. Kids on bicycles do wheelies and pump their fists in the air. A driver in a Porsche Boxster waves gaily. In Nicasio, for a change of pace, there was a guy in a pickup truck driving in the opposite direction, his left hand reaching far out from the driver's window in a singular gesture, while he repeatedly bellowed a two-word epithet at the cavalcade of Ferraris. It's not clear if any of their drivers responded in kind.

Most of the drivers were content to simply putter along more or less close to the speed limit and far from the limits of the car themselves. A few took chances and passed the others, crossing the solid double yellow line in a burst of speed, but for the most part the day was not a replica of the Mille Miglia.

For the spectators, however, it had a bit of the flavor of watching a major road race. Standing by the side of the road in Bodega Bay, for example, were Bill and Louise McCann.

"Bodega has a population of 1,400 and here you have 100 Ferraris," said Bill McCann, a retired investment adviser, as an F360 purred to a stop near him. "What can you say?"

"Fabulous," Louise McCann said. "Lots of red, which you would expect from a Ferrari."

And, from time to time, you might see a white one, such as Eric Zausner's 1959 Ferrari 400 Superamerica.

Zausner, who is 60, said that despite the car's age he has no doubts about the car's reliability -- "once you restore them and get them all fixed mechanically, they run well. I'd drive this across the United States." He said the car was originally in the collection of the late casino magnate William Harrah.

"Harrah used to drive it from Reno to Las Vegas. He said it was faster than taking his Cessna."

This article appeared on page J - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle