Well, here I am sitting in my hotel room in Bristol thinking about how fast the past week went by. When all is said and done, Cheryl and I will have put almost three thousand miles on the 35^th Anniversary Camaro. The mileage was worth the amount of fun and lasting memories we’ll have of this year’s Power Tour. We stayed in a lot of hotel rooms, some better than others, we ate some good food and some not so good food. We laughed, smiled, and at times felt sad. We met a lot of new friends and caught up with others we haven’t seen for a while. As I reflect on the upcoming two full days of driving, almost 700 miles tomorrow and 600 on Sunday, I took note of all of the things we rocketed past on our travels over the past week.

Today’s drive was the most pleasant of the entire tour with great roads through the hills of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee. When we arrived in Bristol I missed the opportunity to get the car on the Bristol Motor Speedway for a few laps. Although they were allowing Power Tour participants to run their cars down the Bristol Drag Strip, Cheryl reminded me of how painful it would be if I broke the car and caused us to be late getting back to the cities. I still enjoyed the weather and the fun and excitement that the Power Tour brings. Tomorrow we’ll attend the Long Hauler’s presentation where they’ll announce the winner of the 2010 Camaro and the crate engines and hand out the Long Hauler gift. Then we’re off heading towards Minneapolis.

I can confidently say that, while hard to believe, I have recently driven on roads worse than roads in Minnesota! Two common themes in this year’s tour are road construction and rain. Since we’ve had rain every day I haven’t been able to wash the car before today. Tonight’s forecast? Thunder storms! We’ve been woken up twice on this year’s tour by loud thunder and rain…looking forward to a good nights sleep.  More tomorrow from the road to Bristol.

Wow, what a day. Made a few laps around Detroit trying to follow the little orange detour signs out of the city on our destination journey to Dayton Ohio. In contrast from the trip through Detroit, a Dayton local kept us out of trouble during a traffic back up by getting us to the right lane. Traffic control was well done today and we had and easy in and out of the venue. 

By this time in the tour everything is old hat. With 5,000 cars out here with us, I’m still surprised when I see cars I’ve already seen at the venue or the hotel. We’ve met quite a few people and exchanged some great stories. Many of the vendors we’ve seen we’ve met before and will see again at Car Craft Summer Nationals.

 

Tomorrow’s drive takes us through the hilly country into Kentucky!

Smooth sailing the whole way to Detroit. Today was the first of the two longest legs of the journey on the Power Tour at 250 miles. The planned stop for today was the GM Tech Center complete with a tour of the wind tunnel. With the state of GM over the past few weeks, the landing location for today was Metro Motor Park. I didn’t spend much time at the venue today other than hanging out at the Mother’s semi with about twenty other fourth gens waiting for a photo shoot that didn’t materialize. I got a t-shirt from Mothers anyway so the day didn’t go too bad. Also, while at Metro Motor Park we met members from other Camaro Clubs in the area and Aaron got a 1969 Firebird 400 back running again after the owner had trouble keeping the car running on his way to the park. It’s good to be on the tour with 5,000 other car enthusiasts!

 

Also notable for today was the trip past the Michigan Motor Speedway. I was on a conference call with the office while we whizzed by but it was there and I was there so that was cool.

 

Tomorrow’s trip is to Dayton Ohio; again, another 250 mile day. We’ll get started earlier than we did today so we can make it into Dayton sooner that we made it to Detroit today.

 

It was much warmer today, and the ice cream vendors did brisk business. The fairgrounds was easy to find, and easily swallowed the thousands of cars that arrived.It was a nice afternoon, and even though the news threatened thunderstorms, we stayed dry.