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ND trip, as seen thru Shawn's eyes..... (Way LONG)



Except this is a non visual sort of post. Gawd that's funny. 

So, for my, the trip started out friday afternoon, around 4ish. Ken calls
and says lets go. We hook up at his place and get on the road only to hit
the traffic that we had planned on missing. This is the beginning of what
was planned out to be a time management victory, ended up being a time
management massacre. We finally get up to Pottermans (6:30pm) and meet up
with Doug, Iain, Kevin and the east coast representatives Daun and Jim.
Damn, Daun is a short little shit. Much shorter than the pictures. :)
J/K, luv you man.
Still our concerns of not having enough room for passengers was a myth.
We had room for a couple more east coasters, at least. (Hint, plan on it
next year beich's.)

Back on the road again heading up to Lompac (However its spelled. Who
cares, non-of-you go there anyways.) For the most part its a good trip.
Speeds kept up for a decent arrival time. No mentionable events that I
can think of other than the wacked springs/roll-bar'd/ stereotypical drag
Civic that thought we would play with him. As if! 
We hook up with James Groot at............... somewhere. Now were a
caravan of 6 rocs. 
Kevin avoids a couple sure thing accidents. Typical when you've just
finished a car project, somebody is dead set on hitting you. First one
was he and another car were merging into the same lane. I thought Kev had
the right of way but I guess she thought otherwise and forced her way in.
Nice bit of driving by the Kevster. Next mentionable moment was on the 2
lane road going into Lompac. Passing places are rare and we were in a
spot to pass a slow truck. Kevin pulls out to pass, but doesn't really go
anywhere. There is a car comming at him and he doesn't do anything.
Fearing that he is playing chicken or just trying to scare the piss out
of Daun, I get on the radio to bring up the possibility of a head on
collision. About that time he makes an evasive maneuver and avoids the
accident. Phew, close one dude. Funny how after that he didn't try to
pass anybody again. Hmm. :)


next morning finds Doug up at 4am and doing a sunrise video tour. The
rest of us sleep in until 6:30 or so. For some odd reason, I dream of the
sound of a car skidding, then impacting another car. We get up and for
the second year in a row, discover that the concept of getting breakfast
in a reasonable amount of time is not something that will ever happen in
that town. We get on the road at 9:30-10am or so. Man that sucked.

Leaving town we hit the road that nobody knows the name of. We should
call it "Scirocco Highway" because its the only road we've ever been on
that had tight ass twisty roads and we NEVER catch other cars. We have
the entire what, 5-6 mile driver intensive road to ourselves. I was
fortunate enough to be the very last car on the caravan. You guys just
cant know how cool it is to watch 5 other (Well, I could only actually
see 3 cars at the most thru most of that portion of the trip.) Scirocco's
slicing thru the corners. It was a good 70% effort which left us with a
30% oops factor. (Meaning we drove well within our limits of the drive.) 

Then we were back on HWY 1 for the remainder of our trip. It was much
better than last years drive, much less traffic, most of the highway had
been repaired from the years previous storm damage. There's only one
place left where we had to stop. The coastal weather was beautiful, nice
and cool which allowed us to play hard and keep vital engine/tire temps
down. 

[Shawn's first observation. ]
I realized on this portion of the trip that when your on public roads,
the tighter and twisteir the roads, the higher the fun level is. On the
autox course, its just the opposite. How odd. 

We made great time considering our late departure from Lompoc. That was
up until we got close to San Jose. I don't even know which highway we
were on but we got stopped in traffic for yet another SUV roll over. Hope
nobody got hurt. Get past that only to be back in the shit. As we got
thru traffic, it appeared that the merging highways would merge lanes in
the middle of the roads. As in, merge lanes #4 and #5 leaving 6-7-8 open.
WTF, that's so lame. So as were sitting in traffic im thinking about the
audio dream I had the night before. Sure enough, I hear a really
quick/short skidding followed by a solid impact. Not exactly like the
dream and as I was looking around to find out where its going on, also
thinking to myself that im damn glad it wasn't a premonition dream.
Looking out the drivers window, I see a couple cars disappearing into a
huge dust cloud. Were stopped in traffic so as the cloud drifts away, I
see a Mitsubishi Eclipse (00') and a Mustang (00') Both with paper plates
parked head first into the guardrail. The mustang rear ended the eclipse,
turned the eclipse left and ran into the guardrail. The mustang passes in
front of the eclipse and turns left, then it too hits the guard rail head
on. What a show. Both drivers get out and seemed to be ok. 

Eventually we get thru traffic and get to the hotel. Some of the other
folks are already there. I wont even go into the way too late braking
story. Its already ben told. So, let the festivities begin!!! We quickly
find a do-it-yourself car wash. Took us a while to get there, kinda.

[Shawn's second observation. ]
You will NEVER find a group of 10 guys feverishly cleaning the crap out
of anything like they will clean their car.  (Quote me on that if you
like.)

Back to the hotel but this time, the trip is somehow much faster than the
way we went. Hmm, damn local guys. :)
There was an amazing catch of a beer from the 3rd floor balcony. I dunno
anything about it tho. Something I heard is all.
 
As it turned out, after all the driving we did, we just werent into
driving another 45 minutes to go eat dinner. I only speak for myself that
I looked foreward to the place T-man picked out and hooked us up with
special accommodations, but just couldn t accept driving another 45
minutes each way. BEsides, I know we all intended on drinking and the
risks were just too high. Weary travelers/food/booz just don't mix. We
discovered that there was a resteraunt within walking distance at the
mall, we talked about it and decided to go that route. T-man wasn't too
happy about that, which is perfectly understandable. I think we made up
for it the next day tho. :) 


The resteraunt tells us we have a 3-4 hour wait. Whatever, we bail back
to the hotel (Long ass walk too!) and the Potterwoman works her charm and
hooks us up with the lobby entertainment area for us to chow down on
pizza and beer while we watch some of Doug's videos. Some dude with a
corrado joined us. While the video is playing of the local car show that
Doug went to, Doug panned by a corrado. This dude says "Hey, now There's
a REAL car". I think the entire room quickly looked at him. like,
dumbass. Nice enough guy, it was funny. 

Out to the parking lot for our Scirocco festivities. Man, that's a
classical event if ther ever was one. The weather was great for being
outside at midnight too!

Next morning Potterman and I do a local recon. We find a Target and
report back to the hotel where the troops are mounting up. We head out to
Target for supplies. On the way Shannon is up first at the light in the
#1 lane. Im in the #2 lane. Mr. CHP is in the cross traffic #2 lane,
stopped. Being me, I challenge him to a drag race. Light turns green and
I smoke his 2.0L 16V. Not much of a story. Sorry I smoked you kid. 

So we get to Target. We looked like a bunch of last minute campers.
Folding chairs were disappearing quickly! Shannon puked in the parking
lot. He was a little hung over. Poor kid. He denies it but its true, he
puked. 

Doug is doing running commentary on what's on sale on the talkabouts.
Sales people are saying, "Those arent on sale, where is that comming
from"? Im sure they were glad to see us gone.

Back on the road heading to the show, there was 20 Scirocco's in the
caravan. HOW SWEET WAS THAT!!! Again, I was the last car in line and from
my point of view, that was simply an amazing site. 

Show details are already pretty well know so there's no reason to make
this novel any longer. We came, we saw, we got seen, we kicked ass. The
only award we didn't steal was the best of show award. Some goofball with
red hard won that. I guess for anyone to win that award, you have to drop
your car off at a shop alot, pay alot and don't do anything more than
wipe off the dust at the shows. Lame. Whatever, we didn't need that
award. I thought his car sucked. A turbo with no intercooler. Whatever.
Anyways, T-man stole the peoples choice award. (How did he do that??)
<shrug>
WE stole the participation award. WE RULE. Im really curious as to what
kind of press we will get out of this. I don't think we will get ANY
other than what ND posts to their web site. I didn't hear of any of the
car mags walking around the show much less taking pics for an article. It
would be nice if that happened tho.

The trip home was good. We left the show at 4:30 and I got home right at
midnight. I put 13 hours on my engines hour meter, 987 miles and got 32
MPG. (Amazing considering the amount of WOT/high rev time I put on the
car this weekend.)

I had a great time. Im a little burnt out on the driving tho. This trip
it seemed like we were always trying to get somewhere. Time flew by too
fast. I think next year (Even tho at the show I was saying it would be my
last trip. I lied.) id like to get there on Friday and come home monday
morning.

I really enjoyed meeting all the people that showed up. You guys from
Seattle Roc! that's a hell of a drive you guys do for a show. I know, its
well worth it and without you, it wouldn't of been the show it was.

Im still tired.


Shawn Meze
86' Jetta GLi 8V                   84' Scirocco 8V <--NEW
82' Scirocco GTi -FSP 30-   81' future "Project Scirocco FSP"
The Fastest, Quickest, Cleanest and best looking Scirocco in all of San
Diego!
http://www.Geocities.com/MotorCity/Speedway/1308/index.htm

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