Thanks to my good friend Aaron we have the tickets (ROW B!!) to go and see Jeff Dunham and Co in Springfield, MO!! Boy, getting them wasn’t easy. We saw some tickets being sold on StubHub so we tried to order them through their site. First, we needed an US address. We have one of those in Florida (using www.myus.com) and my credit card has an address registration on that specific address. So, we thought ordering shouldn’t be too hard.. Wrong. Stubhub’s system won’t authorize the transaction, because of a ‘postal code’ failure. I’ve been in contact with the Stubhub supportdesk.. nice people but trying to put our order trough the same system as the website and then noticing that ‘hey it doesn’t work??’ isn’t really a sign of pure cleverness..Well, again thanks to Aaron we’ll be going to Jeff and his puppet friends!

It seems that the Cadillac Seville and the Lincoln Town Car are less available then we expected en hoped for. We have emailed some private sellers and some companies in (the neighbourhood of) Las Vegas for such cars, but, maybe because of the time difference, the amount of reactions are a bit dissappointing.

Our premium car-search-site is www.autotrader.com. Nice site, pretty fast and with many links to interesting stuff. For example, the history of every car in America can be looked in to on www.carfax.com. Very nice. In the Netherlands only used car companies, service stations and dealerships can look into the odometer-history. But that tells nothing about damage. Carfax shows all ackward things about a car. It’s a nice help in our car search.

Because of the lack of honest Cadillacs and Lincolns we also have to look further. We have to because we have to get the car insured in time, so a deal must be made as soon as possible. We have found a dutch company, Alessie, which is able to insure our car in the US. But Mrs. Alessie also told us that it takes about a week to get all the paperwork done.

Thats why we are looking for other nice cars. We now are using www.craigslist.com and www.ebay.com to find our feature transportation vehicle.

As you all know, it has to have a V8 engine, must have a working airconditioning, must be a real American (musle) car, must be reliable to be able to bring us 3500 miles further to Miami, and must be nice enough to make sure we will get a good price when we will sell the car in Miami.

By coincidence we now have three Jeep Cherokee’s in sight. All of them have their pros and cons, but are all nice to drive.

Let’s wait and see, who is really interested in selling their car ánd be able to follow the car on the journey it’s going to make…

The first couple of touristic (but beautiful) places we’re going to visit have been identified.

The big dam you see in the picture is Hoover Dam, a large dam built to supply the city of Las Vegas with energy (which, with all the light, uses a lot of that. Our visit to Hoover Dam is not sure yet, we need to find out if it is on the way to Phoenix en we don’t want to miss out on the next two highlights.

Next is Bryce Canyon, which i think is one of the most beautiful National Parks the US has to offer. I’ve had the luxury to have visited this place twice before and it is stunning.

Close to Las Vegas is also the Grand Canyon,

A beautiful rupture across the state of Nevada. I don’t have very good memories about the Grand Canyon. Me and my family once took an airplane trip across and I got very sick. This time i’m not flying so, although from a lesser interesting perspective, i think this experience will be much better.

Next on the trip is El Paso (and Roswell, which i will talk about in a later blogentry). Quintijn thought El Paso would be a very nice place to visit because it being a bordertown with Mexico we could scoup over to Mexico and add that to our “Been There Done That” list. While talking about it at the office our collegue Costyn mentioned that El Paso is not the best place to go to when being in that area. He said we should go to White Sands and Carlsbad Caverns. So we looked up some pictures on Google and were sold right away (see what i mean below).

So, then i told my wife Marloes that i was going to need her supersonic high tech special camera which she told me i could not have. A smart thing because i wouldn’t be able to operate it anyway, that’s why i bought a much simpeler Panasonic half a year ago. Perfect camera, lots of zoom and i’m happy with it.

These are the first of our touristic highlights. If you, like Costyn, have some brilliant suggestions of places to visit, please let us know!

The Netherlands is well known because of our drugs- and prostitution policy. We are distributing soft- en harddrugs to addicts, so they don’t have to steal, we allow smoking or taking softdrugs because we think it will be a much bigger problem if it is an illegal good. And although I never tried any kind of drug, I can say that I’ve never experienced any vandalism or something by a drugs- or alcohol addict.

I think, and hope, that the Netherlands are also well known worldwide, for our sports-achievements. Robert Doornbos, (Rookie of the Year 2007 in the American Champcar Series), Francisco Elson (San Antonio Spurs), Semmy Schilt (K1 Fighting World Champion) and of course our soccer heroes Johan Cruijff, Marco van Basten and (currently headcoach of the L.A. Galaxy) Ruud Gullit.

Another thing about our country which is pretty representative is the huge amount of houses, bicycles and cars in such a small country. For example: the surface of the Netherlands is 33.875 km2 in compare to 9.629.091km2 of the United States of America. But in our small country we had 15.713.022 km’s traffic jam in the year 2007! In one year…

Pretty frustrating, I can tell you. Especially between the biggest cities in the Netherlands, you will always find yourself stuck in traffic jam.So another reason to come and visit the United States of America. The country which has plenty room, 6.430.366 kilometres of highway, and the biggest highway in the world, the Katy Freeway (part of Interstate 10) in Houston, Texas has a total of 26 lanes!! Wow! Therefore hopefully the country of less traffic jam and lots of quite areas.

I can hardly wait!

To introduce ourselfs let me tell you all something about Eelco. Eelco is one of my best friends since 3 years or so. After selling him, and his wife Marloes, 5 cars in 1,5 year they asked me come and join their company IC&S. Since then we are doomed to work with each other on a daily basis and sometimes we do feel sorry for our collegues.It seems that we are a bit noisy when we are together.

We are always laughing and arguing a lot and our high testosterol level makes that we bet a lot on our capacities in knowledgement about cars or on our own sport efforts or whatever crosses our way. I have paid for one Japanees dinner so far and Eelco had to buy me 2 expensive dinners at the restaurant of the famous dutch cook Herman den Blijker and one at the Muscial Tarzan in Scheveningen. Stupid bets about where the ‘DSC’ button is in a BMW 530i E39 or who is going to win the next squash games between us. Like I said, many dumb but nice bets and challenges.We both squash 2 times a week, pretty fanatic. That’s also because of our high testosteron level; “Everybody may lose as long it isn’t me, and especially not from him”. We would rather be spitting blood then giving up.

Eelco is also my personal (not responding) helpdesk. He’s the one who can fix all of my computer screw-ups. As long as I am his sales, I’m paid to sell our services, not to fix my own e-mail account, back up or other strange stuff I know nothing about. Because I can be a bit lazy, Eelco will not always help me. But I have to admit, I don’t know anybody who has more knowledge about computer-related stuff than he does.

Besides this we talk a lot about cars. As a former car salesman it is obvious that I’m into cars. My favourite kind of car is BMW. I managed to make Marloes and Eelco even enthousiastic (for that time) about my brand and the optional possibilities of BMW. Eelco has also a weak spot about Ford Mustangs. Especially the Shelby, “the best car ever” like he is saying al the time. I’m more in to speed and exposure of cars. And we both love strange cars. Like the beautifull Cadlillac Seville STS or SLS. Wow, what a 3th braking light on the complete width of the car. Of course we like V8 engines better than the 6 cylinders. The sounds, the power, just terrific.

But we also do have a lot of differences. Like he is a father and I’m not. Like he is the boss at work and I’m not. Like he drives a 3-litre double turbo diesel engine and I’m moving myself in a 2,5 litre gasoline engine, like he has a lot of knowledge of technical stuff which I’m not interested in, and he doesn’t know anything about sports, like his wife picks out his clothes because he doesn’t know anything about fashion wich I do, like he is 2 meters and I’m 1,81 meter, his wife is blond, my girlfriend has brown hair (at the moment), and last but least he has been to the US many time while I have never been there before.