After much deliberation (about 6 minutes) Quintijn and I decided to change the route. Why? Well, an old schoolbuddy of Quintijn told him that Phoenix isn’t really the place to be (sorry ’bout that people from Phoenix, but that’s what we were told by experts). I had a meeting with two people from the US last week and they told me that driving through Texas is that same thing as slowly dying, but more painful. As we’re not signing up for a boring trip we strongly reconsidered and change the route. So, we’re missing out on the caverns, white sands and Roswell. Instead, we’re getting enough time for Bryce and Zion, Arches Natl. Park and cities like Denver CO, Colorado Springs CO, Kansas City MI (we’re doing a Kansas City Shuffle). The biggest advantage is time and distance; it’s about 600 miles less in the first 6 days!

Our complete route (and schedule) is covered at the route button in the menu above. Please let us know if we’re missing out on this or if you have any other places of interest we can visit!

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,–.

In four weeks…

• …we will begin our journey to the East of the US
• …I will have had the longest airplane-flight i have ever had
• …I will feel like crap because of this long flight
• …I’ll have bought my cowboy-boots, especially for this trip
• …we’ve both became miljonair in Las Vegas
• …we’ll own the Roadmaster
• …we have put all the bumperstickers on the car (www.lasvegas2miami.com and www.jurgo.nl so far and all the other sponsors who will support us. Interested? Contact us!)
• …we’ll own our personal licenseplate
• …we will have put all our equipment in the car (alarm, navigation, GPS Tracker, mobile (I-) Phones, I-Pods, I-trip, extra woofers, etc)
• …we will be leaving Las Vegas and heading for Phoenix!

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