Return to Reality

Well I just experienced roughly the best 10 days of my life last week. My dad, brother, and I took off to Monterey California for the Historic races. This is always one of the highlights of my year, and this year was no different. Porsche was the featured brand, and was well represented throughout the race groups. One highlight was seeing the "Fabulous Hudson Hornet" on the track.

From there we went on to Hoover Dam and stayed overnight in Las Vegas dropping by the Harley-Davidson cafe, and stayed at the Luxor pyramid (won't be doing that again! but that's a different topic). Hoover Dam is such an incredible display of engineering and construction ability.

Then we got to "the good part". From Las Vegas we took 95South then went through Bullhead City headed towards Oatman, Az. What we didn't realized from google maps is that most of the road into Oatman from the direction we took was unpaved. While it didn't turn out to be a problem at all it was a bit disconcerting to be driving a Town-Car down a dirt road. It was well worth the trip though, because the road LEAVING Oatman is part of Old 66... and is so curvy that apparently people used to hire local drivers to navigate it because they were afraid to drive it themselves. Again the Town Car wasn't quite ideal for this, but a fun road is a fun road!

Once the Route66/Oatman detour was complete we headed up to the Grand Canyon, first time there for any of us. Words and pictures simply can't express how amazing that is. Such an amazing display of God's handiwork. We only had a few hours there, and I think you could spend several weeks and still not fully appreciate it.

Finally we headed to the Phoenix area to get down to business. Bondurant Driving School. We had signed up for the 4 day Grand Prix course at Monterey last year and have been in anticipation ever since. It exceeded expectations in almost every way. The instructors were VERY helpful and knowledgeable, the other students were friendly and respectful. Of course any chance to drive Corvettes and open wheel race cars over 100mph all out on a road course is going to be fun, but it was the true sense of learning. After 5 years in engineering school learning about vehicle dynamics, it was nice to feel how it all comes together and apply the theory. Learn how to find the best line, trail braking, rev matching. Learning each piece one at a time and then feeling it all come together out on the track. The only thing that was a bit of a dissapointment is we never got any timed laps. From an instructional standpoint it would have been interesting to have a "before and after" lap time comparison.

Anyway, Tuesday was back to work for me. It was sad to have such a great week finally come to an end, but then 10 days is a long time to be away from home, it's good to be back.... but now I'm really itching to get the 911 on a track!