Day Four: "The Easy" Road

Today started with a rumor that half of Iowa was washed away. So I hopped on the Hot Rod Magazine website and it was correct. They had new directions to follow to go around the washed out portions. So with the weather still looking like it is going to pour at any moment, we loaded up and headed out.

We were traveling on the Cornhusker Hwy when all of a sudden about a dozen Hot Rod Power Tour members came screaming past us in the opposite direction. The guys in front of us did a u-turn to follow them.

So I joined them and we grabbed I-80 East, cruising on the highway at around 80 or so. It was a very boring ride, though. I loved traveling through small town America, but going on a major highway wasn’t my idea of fun. Continue reading…

Nothing really happened for the next few hours, the cars in our caravan were just booking it to Ames. The Caprice pulled into Ames at 1:30 with overcast skies. All day it looked like it was going to rain. Thankfully is stayed away until after our show.

I spent most of my time walking around seeing all the new cars that came in. I met some members from carjunkieforums.com and dodgecharger.com. It was really cool to see the cars that they had.

There was also an autocross event there. It was really interesting seeing the whole group of cars going out there. There were wagons, muscle cars, hot rods, street rods, Atoms.

I made my way into the back corner of the show with some friends and just hung out for most of the last few hours of the show. Near the end of the show some friends of ours told us that their starter was dead and that they were going to go work on it. And of course we all decided to help them out.

Everyone WAS gone. Napa was gone, GM Performance rejected us, so we were in the middle of the parking lot with muscle cars circling the near dead Camaro. The guys came back with the new starter and a better jack to get the car up. We had a jack and jackstand keeping the car up as we took the old mini-starter out. But the new one was bigger, so the guys had to pull the header to get the new one in.

It was a real pain in the rear, but they got the new starter in and got the Camaro running. The funniest thing was about 30 people stopped by through the two hours we worked on the car. They were saddened that they had missed the show. Even a lady cop came over and was talking with us and taking pictures.

In the end we all had a good time and made new friends. We left there feeling good and headed to our hotels. There were some strong thunderstorms going through and I was wiped out. So off to sleep, another adventure awaits me tomorrow.

You can see the rest of my pics from Day 4 on Flickr.