There she is! Isn’t she a beauty? When getting up today we were all excited, because today was the day we were getting our car! So, first we went online to check out the location of Mike from Instant Auto Sales and the DMW, Department for Motorvehicules in Las Vegas. With those locations memorized, the hot-standby-cam was with us the whole time. FYI: we have two cams, one is a small sony handycam which is with us most of the time. We use this one for most of the short-film recordings on the site. The other one is a HD sony HVR V1E, which is a prosumer HD cam (higer recording speed, better lens etc.). This cam is used for our feature film at the end of our trip, we’ve used it to cover last Vegas just a couple of minutes ago at night time.

So, we found Instant Auto Sales, and when we arrived we already saw the people of IAS washing our soon-to-be car. We were extremely impressed, everything seemed to go alright. Then we went up to the office to meet Mike. Mike is a extremely nice fellow from New Zealand who’s the manager at IAS. We had a really nice time with him while his mechanics and cleaning crew were working on the car. Mike showed us his impressive set of riffles and his handgun, right from his pocket. Since guns and riffles aren’t allowed in the Netherlands this was a exiting thing to see.

To talk a little more about guns; Mike showed us a car that was shot at eight times! It looked like swiss cheese. So, as a souvenir, we got one of the bullits.

Then, while wrapping up the paperwork, Mike started thinking about our buy and found a way for us not to have to go to the DMV (since we’re selling the car within a month, we could get a temporary registration) and because we’re from out-of-state Mike could waive the required taxes so we ended up paying $3000 for this beautiful car, all thanks to the hard work and creativity of Mike!

We closed the deal and returned the rental car with the two cars, being very happy the whole way. In the afternoon, at the hotel, we tried to hook up the GPS system to start tracking our trip. Then the cigarette lighter didn’t seem to work. So, after checking the fuses ourself we decided to go to Mike for help. Somehow, the connection to the ciggy lighter seemed broken so Mike fixed us a whole new connection in a couple of hours.

In the pictures above you see Mike doing his magic. Thanks Mike for all your help and support!! (We’re know he’s reading this, he’s one of the lucky lv2m sticker owners

So, everthing now works like a charm, the car drives really good and all the systems aboard seem to work perfectly. We just went to the strip to shoot some film for the big movie that’s coming up. Now we’re really tired about this whole day (only slept for about 5 hours last night) and about to get some sleep (actually, Quintijn has been sleeping for the last hour, his jetlag made him do it Tomorrow is another big day. About a 4 hour travel, checking out Zion and Bryce National Parks. Starting tomorrow we’ll be uploading the GPS info as well.

Below is the movie about how we got our car! You can also check out our pictures!

(The movie could take a little time before you can see it, it has to be processed by YouTube).

With only one week to go, this will be the week of waiting and testing for me. On monday morning i’ll be transporting Eelco to the airport, and next sunday i’ll be heading for the airport myself. But I still have to pack all of my stuff. Pretty hard to figure out what kind of clothing i have to take with me. Because of the great temperature-differences between some city we will visit: Houston 12c, Las vegas 11c, Springfield -4c, Miami 27c… So, what will it be? Jeans, sweaters and gloves? Or shorts, t-shirts and a baseball cap for the sun? I really dont know, but i can’t take it all…

In the meantime, we bought some goodies in Amsterdam to promote our country over there. Orange wooden boots and 4 crazy T-shirts. We also bought all kinds of adapter, electricity-splitters, USB Cables, I-pod cables and memory card readers.

And we received the stickers today. Anyone? They are for sale also!

But besides all that, we are pretty buisy testing all kinds of stuff. How long does the camera battery holds it? Does our flickr- and twitter account work? Is my skype account still working? That way it will be easier and most of all cheaper to communicate with my girlfriend and others in Europe during our trip. Does theGPS tracker works like it suppose to do? Looks good so far.

So only one week to go, no set back what so ever so far. So, let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope this week will pass very quickly!

I’am allmost ready to go!

As we told you before, it is possible to insure an American car without being an American. That’s pretty good news for foreign people, like us.

But it’s not as easy as it sounds. To get your car insured you first have to select a car. This sounds pretty obvious, but it is not. Because of the rather complex way of registering a car, the insurance company will not give you an insurance fee quote, because it’s to much work to calculate the fee.

You will get the fee for your car in a take it or leave it offer. Pretty strange. At the other hand, the prices are not that high that you will spend much time in comparing different insurance companies.

When you buy a car, make sure to add an option in your agreement to cancel the deal when the car cannot be insured. That makes buying a car a litle more difficult because sales people usually don’t like extra cancellation options. But there are carsalesman who will help. Our contact with Mike was great and he was willing to make us a deal with this possibility.

After that you have to fill in the application form. This must be the application of the state you will register your car in. These form are very difficult to complete. U can find a manual on the internet which has 16 pages! But we, especially Eelco, were able to fill in all the questions in good order the first try. After that we have sent the form to Mrs. Alessie, our dutch insurance agent. Then the process takes about five days to complete.

This week we received some good news from Mrs. Alessie; there was no problem what so ever for us to insure the Roadmaster. The total costs of insurance for the Roadmaster will be $ 145,–.

As an addendum on my previous post: we might also be able to pick our own licenceplate (as long as the text is not taken). Please help us to decide what text we should take? Please let us know in the comments.

Too bad, this one is already taken

This weekend we, Nadine (Quintijn’s girlfriend), Marloes (my wife), Quintijn and me, went to Ober- hausen in Germany. Quintijn and I were looking for Roadmaster gadgets (our USA car will be defined as Roadmaster from now on). Ofcourse, we’ll be making LasVegas2Miami.com bumper stickers (soon to be available in our store ) and halter tops with our faces and the LV2M logo on it (only $49,95, also to be available in our shop ). Las but not least Jurgen from Jurgo.nl is so kind to sponsor us with cool eyeware™ and the Roadmaster is ofcourse, in essence, cool by itself.

So, what more do we need? Well, the car needs to be dressed up a bit. Our girls were telling us that we would need signs with “Want sex?” and “Just Married” on the Roadmaster. When we reacted very enthusiastic about it they told us we were not allowed to put on those signs. So, as Quintijn wrote in another log-entry, we already have the hubcaps but we’re looking for more to dress up the car. Another thing the girls came up with (as seen here on the left) is not really the thing we’re looking for. Something we wanted but was too expensive were these Nitro shaped woofers. As Quintijn wrote, we’re going to enjoy the nineties all over again and the more sound the better. Arno (my brother) gave me his entire nineties collection so we’re getting somewhere.

Not only the car needs to look good, we need to look even better as well. We’re going to look for Cowboy boots and hats to blend in as real Americans. Quintijn already tried some of the hats yesterday in Oberhausen (as can be seen below). Before that he tried some – in his own word – extremely cool shoes. I agree, with these shoes he would be the absolute king in Miami. Unfortunately both potential buys were vetoed off by the ladies. They won’t be on the trip so that problem is solved in time