TRIP STARTED            Wed Mar  5 07:51:42 2008
TOTAL TRACKPOINTS:      2043
TOTAL DISTANCE:         838.88 km
HIGHEST SPEED:          162.07km/h
AVERAGE SPEED:          89.07km/h
HIGEST POINT:           3394.2m
LOWEST POINT:           1186.2m
TOTAL TRAVEL TIME:      11:58:11
TRIP ENDED              Wed Mar  5 19:49:53 2008

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First i’d like to say, we’ve made it!! What a trip did we have today. We experienced three special things: Being pulled over by the Highway Patrol, having seen a fantastic landscape at Arches National Park and last but not least facing a real snowstorm at an height of more than 3000 meters.

This morning we left from our Best Western Motel in Salina,UT after Eelco gave $ 25,– to the woman who was cleaning the rooms. This was a pretty sad sight. She was, i think, about 35 years old, was cleaning up these rooms, and had her son with her. He was watching TV while his mother was cleaning up the rooms. They both seemed to have peace with their situation, but we thought it was a sad example of the American social system.

Then we went West. First of all we crossed some beautiful landscapes. At some places you could see for hundred kilometers into the valley. We have taken some beautiful pictures of the Grand Canyon over there. you can see them all here.

Allthough it was freezing cold, and there was nobody else around, it was beatiful! Well, nobody around….? As i was cruiseing over a totally abandoned Interstate we pasted a Highway Patrol car which has tracked my (to high) speed. After he pulled us over with lights and sirenes, i had to come out of the car and show him my drivers license. I gave him my International Drivers license. Because our car has a period license, we don’t use a normal licenseplate. That became the reason for our Copper-friend to ask me a lot of questions about the purchase of the car. After all, it ended up with getting a ticket of $ 82,– for my speeding of 88 miles an hour instead of the permitted 75 Miles an hour.

After this experience we (slowly) drove to Arches National Park. This was an amazing sight. It is a mountain ridge with the most beautiful figures and shapes. This has taken shape by the wind, the water, the salt and the extreme temperature differences between day and night and winter and summer. You can see in he movie how beautiful it was.

From Arches we took a ’short-cut” back to the I-70 to Denver. Along the Colorado River we continued te trip. It was a pretty long drive today, but the last 3 hours where pretty bad. We ended up in a snowstorm. We where on more than 3500 meter above see-level and we where even passing world biggest wintersportplaces, like Aspen.

Let me tell you all, we do love the Roadmaster! But driving in a snowstorm, with temparatures of minus 10,6 degrees while snowing, in a car without ABS (it failed again today), traction control, wintertyres (we do have 4 different brands of tyres and one of them does not have that much tyre profile), rear wheel drive and a high weight of 2700kg is not easy and sometimes pretty scary.

But fortunatly we have made it. After eating Mexican food again (for the last time probably, we hope) in a local bar with strange people we are now ready to go to bed. Tomorrow we’ll have a long journey to Kansas City. That’s where we will do the Kansas City Shuffle… (Who know where we are talking about?)

Keep you all posted tommorow! Youtube has a “This functionality is not available right now. Please try again later.” - problem so we can’t upload our new movie. We’ll try and do it tomorrow morning. It is a must-see because it has Quintijn in a police car
Same goes for the route, there is a small problem with the tracking file that we will fix tomorrow.

As you all probably know i have never been to the United States before. My first impressions are pretty divers. Let me share some things i did like and some things i’d like less.

What i did not like so much was the sadness of Las Vegas. Most people there are old and unhappy. Gambling is their only purpose in life left. So sad… What i also disliked where the local flights. I have flown from Houston to Las Vegas with an local flight but that was more like a bus-trip. It was horrible. Very crowdy and noisy. Nobody, even the flight attendents are paying attention to the security procedures. Not that i care, but they could give a good example. And everything is allowed on a local flight. People can take their McDonalds with them in to the plane. That’s totally different from the maximum of 200ml fluid or so you may carry on an intercontinantal flight, as long as it sealed. Pretty big differents.

What i do like are the free refills in every restaurant. Because i am pretty addicted to Cola that heaven for me! Also the big cars are great. 32″ rims under some SUV’s and Pick up trucks, lots of chrome, i love it :-). What i also like is the price you pay for food. It’s reallynothing. We went to a mexican restaurant yesterday where i ordered Quessadillas and Shrimp dinner. Together it’s costed me $ 16,–. That real cheap.

Well, we going on our way to Denver now, so we will be sharing more impressions and experiences later today. We’ll be online in about 9 hours.

ps. Sorry for the grammatical errors, i was in a hurry.

So, today we made it from Las Vegas to Salina in Utah (which is the smallest town in the world). We had some really cool lights turning on and off while we were driving (ABS Brake and Service Engine Soon) which didn’t affect the quality of driving at all. Actually i should call it floating because that’s what it feels like. On the pictures above (one is done while driving and the other while we’re doing an auto-timer picture (with a part of red-rock canyon on the back). Much more fabulous pictures can be found at the flickr site.

Here’s the whole trip.

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Total trip info:

TRIP STARTED            Tue Mar  4 10:08:32 2008
TOTAL TRACKPOINTS:      1536
TOTAL DISTANCE:         699.57 km
HIGHEST SPEED:          159.83km/h
AVERAGE SPEED:          94.84km/h
HIGEST POINT:           2423.1m
LOWEST POINT:           0m
TOTAL TRAVEL TIME:      7:56:45
TRIP ENDED              Tue Mar  4 18:05:17 2008

Too bad the temprature isn’t displayed. We went from about 20 degrees in Las Vegas to -8 degrees (actual temp, feels like -13) here in Salina. Since we we’re dressed for Vegas, this was quite a shock. When we arrived here in Salina, we tried to find a place to eat. This town is very small so we went to the only good restaurant in town, The Mexicano. The rest of all the citizens of this town where there eating.

I’m going to go to bed now (Quintijn is again struck down by his jetlag and sleeping like baby). Below are two small movies from the trip, enjoy! (again, since youtube takes some time to process the movies, they might nog work just yet. Please be patient!).

Bonus feature:

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).