Well there is no time for sleep or rest over at the office, just after getting back from NOPI miami the team was on the road again. This time the destination was some place a little less swampy.. Long Beach California.. The sun, beach the babes, drifting. Thats right, it time for Formula D Long Beach!!!!
So after waiting for ever to arrive in Ft. Lauderdale for Nopi Miami, we finally make it in. We crash for the night and then head out to the track… Or I I like to call it the swamp..
and for those of you that don’t believe that there was a track some where out here, here it is:
It was pretty much a crazy week end, but what are you going to do??? Not take photos and video?? Nope. We stuck it out and came out with some killer stuff and we managed to not get eaten by the alligator that was roaming the parking lots…
That area was pretty much my domain, plus filming some interviews when I wasn’t running from swamp thing…
On Monday morning, we made our way back to the good old ATL…
Well let me start out by pointing out a vary serious fact… Moroso Motorsport park is not in Miami, in fact is is nearly 3 hrs and 2 major airports away… Lucky we figured this out before we flew into Miami.
On Friday night, Montye and I made out trek to the good old ATL airport to fly down to Ft. Lauderdale to meet up with Joey. We didn’t really think that we would make it down there since at the time Atlanta was undergoing another set of wonderful thunderstorms. After sitting at the Airport for a few hours we finally boarded our wonder Air Tran plane. The weather was wonderful:
I managed to take that photo while waiting to leave the gate. There was an insident on our flight, a lady’s cat would not fit under the seat in front of her. This caused us to sit at the gate forever… The guy next to me had a great way to deal with it. He wanted to BBQ the cat.. Sadly Airtran would not let me do that so instead we had to sit and wait for the situation to be dealt with.
Finally we took off and then proceeded to Ft. Lauderdale..
While waiting for Joey to come and pick us up(he was watching CSI and Phil’s place) I was standing next to this sign that was located in the loading zone.
If you can’t stand, how are you supposed to wait for people pick you up?? Ya ummm……
After being picked up from the airport, we made our way to the hotel, about an hour away…
Tomorrow, NOPI “Miami”
After rolling through that tight gas station and getting lost, we finally arrived in Austin for a week of craziness with the Indy bands of the world:
After getting stuck in some killer Austin traffic(who knew they had traffic in Austin, TX). We arrived at the Austin Convention center for South by South West.
Once we were there the week seemed to blow by. I did a really poor job of documenting this week, but I’ve got a few highlights.
This is perhaps on the best things that happened while we where there:
I don’t know if you can tell, but that man wearing the brown shirt behind the protest sign is good old Phil, laying down the Fuze law and kicking Rockstar out of the town. Thats right get out Rockstar, Fuze is up in this place!!
We did a lot of stuff down on 6th Street after all it was only 3 blocks away from out hotel.
The rest of the time we spent down at Town Lake:
A view from a little higher…
I couldn’t tell you the bands that played, but the ones that I heard kick some ass.
And then there was this little beauty:
Now there is something that was a little bit wrong with this van. Why on earth would there be an out of service sign on a black conversion van? I don’t know why…. It just seems a bit off. I’ll leave you to draw your own conlusions.
That pretty pretty much sums up SxSW except for the part where we got delayed in Houston while Atlanta was being destroyed by Tornado’s.
On the road again…
This time the target was the South By South West Music Festival. The plan was to fly into Houston TX, rent a car and then drive to Austin, for the Festival. The reason for this? Houston has Airtran, the official airline of PM Lifestyle and then roll into Houston in a rental. The plan started out good.. Until someone missed thei flight into Houston and left Joey, Montye and my self driving around for a hour or so. But it was not a total waste since while driving around we drove past this little wonder:
That almost makes the waiting worth it, not quite though.
Finally after grabbing our missing companion at the airport we made our way to Austin. If course we had to grab some sweet footage of the drive along the way…
We made a stop at this sweet gas station. Not be cause we needed gass, but because we needed to change tapes in the camera. This gas station had a full bar in hit complete with a pool table:
Thats about it, except for the fact the we drove about 3 hours off course and it took 6 hours to make the 3 hour drive to Houston.
Yesterday was AMA Supercross at the Georgia Dome. Michael’s Uncle had a couple of extra passes and I was able to get in to my first Supercross event!! I must say that supercross rocks although the best part was the beginning of the show. Check it out:
They also did some crazy work with some good old fire ball pryo:
The actual race was really sick. The best part is by far when then start and are all fighting for position. That is when the real mayhem starts.
I can’t tell you who actually won the race. We dipped out early to beat the traffic and say hey to Sarah who was in Atlanta for a the night. That is actually when the real action started. Joey’s navigation went amiss and starting sending us to all sorts of places that where not actually our destination and leading us to dead end roads that had homeless people sleeping in them. Not to fear, a quick phone call to Seth, the man of Atlanta, and we were back on our route and met up with Sarah to say hello for a few before heading back to K-Town.
Last week, I was at the Daytona 500. Let me tell you, that was a crazy week!! We landed on Tuesday afternoon at the Daytona Airport. You can tell from the time that you land that this airport was build just for the Daytona 500. You can literally see the race track from the runway and of course this what you find at baggage claim:
The best part of that sign is that it is the home of the LPGA. Yep, NASCAR and the LPGA, what more can you want?
The first day we spend filming at Walmart and other locations. But real action did not start until the next day, Wednesday or maybe it was Thursday. I can’t recall the week was really a blur. For most of the races and the qualifying, I was either in the pits:
Or I was up in the hospitality booth that sat right above the pits:
For the whole week, I had a cold pass, basically that meant that I could go anywhere when the track was cold. I managed to grab these shot of the NOS cars. The 50 Car was for the CUP race:
This was the NOS 30 Car it was used in the Nationwide Race:
Make no mistakes, this was a week of work. But there was one time in that week, that I did get to see the beach.
But while I saw the car, I did not actually get to feel the sand under me feet. Which would have been nice, but there was no time for that nonsense.
After the 500 was over it was every man for his self. Picture it if you can, 300,000 people trying to leave the the same place at the same time. We managed to fight our way out of the parking lot after about 1.5 hours. We then managed to make our way to the highway, where we encountered this little problem:
Some how after driving for what seemed like 30min with the display showing that we were out of gas, we managed to coast into the gas station and refuel. I don’t know how we manged to pull that one off but it was amazing!!
I’ve got more to post about, like how why we drove back to the ATL the same night, but that is going to be for another day. This post is to long as it is.
Last Saturday, Bill’s Dad sang the national anthem at the Atlanta Hawks game. He and his quartet sang a wonderful anthem. Mad props to them. After he sang, we stayed and watched the rest of the game. We had some sick seats.
