This nice bunch of cars is in our next ‘fine car selection’. Let me tell you a little bit about these beauties. First there is the Lexus. We really prefer the Lexus because it is large, Toyotanees (so it has the least chance of breaking down) and well, it is cool. The next one is our personal favorite, the Cadillac STS. There is a story to this car. A couple of years ago we saw it driving here in the Netherlands. Everybody thought it was a very ugly car except Quintijn and I. We love it, especially the rear. I’m extreme fond of the dual dual exhaust setup and Quintijn just loves the 3rd breaking light across the back. Option 3 is probably one of the baddest cars we’ve been looking at so far. It’s called a Cheverolet El Camino. This particular one only has base painting on it (which means it actually needs another paint job), no airconditioning and it’s the oldest car we’ve seen so far (1985). Which means that there is a bigger risk of it breaking down, but also that we only need a paperclip to fix it. Option number 4 is a Dodge RAM 1500 Truck. While being a ‘Truck’ it has only 2WD but we’re not really planning on leaving the road so that’s fine. The color is brilliant and we (actually, i) think it will be easy to sell in Miami (just look at the color, it is the same as 50% of the houses in Miami’s Art Deco district). In the next couple of day’s we’ll be e-mailing and calling the sellers of these cars to see what they can do price wise and listen to all the lies about the condition of the cars

First, let me tell you something about the kind of car we’re looking for. At the ‘used car sales locations’ on the internet we’re using the following filters: price between $2000 - $4000, engine 8 cylinder (this is quite important because we need some spare cylinders in case of engine trouble), airconditioning (we’re crossing A LOT of desserts and dessert like places, that said, according to weather.com it can be as cold as -8 degrees celsius in most places we’re visiting) and cruisecontrol (to prevent dead-feet-syndrome).

So, this bad beauty was our first option. Shaded windows, red and leather rear roof. This would be cool. “No officer, we’re not transporting drugs, we are from Amsterdam though..”. Unfortunatly, Quintijn called the owner and they need to get rid of the car this week because they’re moving to another state. Too bad.

So.. our first post. Just a week ago we started thinking about doing a roadtrip all the way across the USA. Starting in Las Vegas, Nevada (some say the most colorful city at the Westcoast) driving through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, (may be a little bit of Georgia) with final destination Miami, Florida (being the most colorful city on the Eastcoast). 3422 miles, total traveltime: 2 days and 6 hours.

Initially, this wasn’t the exact route we planned to take. But since we want to see Jeff Dunham up in Springfield Missouri, Aliens in Roswell, Chandler in Tulsa and visit New Orleans the route got a bit.. diverse.

Then we decided (after seeing the quotes on car rental websites) that renting isn’t a cool thing to do on a roadtrip. So it was decided that we would buy a car for the trip and sell it again in Florida. Since Quintijn has a history of being a top gun car salesman this part is plannend to go smoothtly. I already called the DMV in Las Vegas to get informed about buying a car in Vegas while not being a US citizen. The DMV-guy told me that all we need is a green-slip and some prove of insurance. Quintijn checked the insurance part and we should be able to insure our car before going to the US. Now all we’ve got to do is find a car, buy it, insure it and pick it up when we get there.

This weblog will change the next couple of weeks. We will report daily on our ongoing preparations, i will add more information to this site like a GPS map which will track our route (Thanks to Costyn (one of our colleague’s at IC&S)), a weather widget which will show our weather conditions, pictures and even video’s. During the whole trip Quintijn and I will be filming as much as possible. So a couple of weeks after being back in Holland we will post a documentary of the trip on this site.