1171 Pt. 1: the long drive

1171 is the number of pictures I took while down in Vegas, with the majority of those being taken at the SEMA convention.  Now finally having some free time to think back I can share my experience from this trip and give a little insight on how to tackle SEMA.

It all starting with a 4am awakening to a cold dark Saskatchewan morning, followed by a lift by Ryan Probe in his slammed s13 Silvia.  Yes, that’s right a Silvia, this was sure to be the type of fun filled road trip that only a 2 decade old JDM import could provide.  So we met up with the rest of the guys and left Regina just after 6 am on what would be one long day of driving, like the 18 hrs kinda long.

Having made it past the border unscathed and into the states we were making great time coming out of a twisty stretch of Montana highway, which was amazing for me bad for Probe having napped through it, when I was clocked going 90mph in a 75.  I still have no idea why we were going that fast.  Even at 75 mph the Silvia is revving close to 4k.

Luckily the Montana State Police are fantastic and let us off with a warning.  As you can see above, Mike is pretty pumped about the whole thing.

The rest of the drive that day went rather smoothly with the only other highlight being Adrian shooting some sparks with the undercarriage on the freeways of Salt Lake City, there were three of us in the Silvia at that time so we were running a tad lower than normal.  Sometimes I wonder how much footage Ryan B actually got on the trip, he filmed a lot of stuff, even us just driving.  Looking at that picture also reminds me of Alex saying “GOOOOD GOOOOD” I don’t know what its from but he said it many many times over the walkies.  At 1:18am we finally arrived at our hotel in Provo ending day one.  I can tell you my ass sure felt it, I haven’t sat in many full buckets and none for hours at a time but the one in the Silvia feels like you’re sitting on a board covered with a thin layer of fabric.

Day two entailed a couple more hours on the road and it became very clear that we were far from home at this point.

Driving lower and lower into the desert it started to feel like we’d gone back in time to the warmer days of summer.  It was an odd feeling jumping out of a cold Lancer into hot dry air to look up at a palm tree for the first time.  Vegas wasn’t far now.

We arrived in Las Vegas for rush hour traffic and the Silvia started to have one of multiple issues.  Blown fan relays in bumper to bumper traffic do wonders to skyrocket coolant temps.  So with the Silvia stuck on the freeway the rest of us went ahead to a gas station to wait.  Ryan and Kris managed to ghetto fab up a solution and catch up to the rest of us.  While at the gas station out of seemingly nowhere we met George Reeds daughter, anyone who doesn’t know George played for the Riders back in the day and was a pretty big deal, she noticed three cars with Sask plates and thought she would say hey.  By now it’s starting to get dark but we managed to get the Silvia patched up so we head off to the Imperial Palace for check in.  Not the most high roller joint on the strip but for only 30 bucks a night who could complain?  Also we had surprisingly very little trouble with the Silvia’s ride height over the course of the trip down, a bit of difficulty getting up the parkade but luckily no speed bumps!   By this time we’re all tired as hell and starving but itching to get out and see the strip, so we grabbed some drinks and start the misleadingly long walk to Mandalay Bay to have supper at Burger Bar.  This place is amazing, Kobe beef makes for one delicious burger, I can’t even describe it you just have to try one for yourself.  Just one thought though, is it wrong to have a choice in how your burger is cooked?  This threw me a bit but I still ended up getting it medium well or some way that seemed not quite safe.  Now Probey on the other hand seemed to like his burger to be still grazing.  But anyways I’ll get into more of the Vegas stuff in Pt. 3.

That’s it for part one, hopefully I’ll have Pt. 2 done shortly and in that one I’ll get into my time at SEMA, what it was like being there for the first time and what I would change if I went again.