6-4-05 Sharktrip

Picnic day.
The funny thing about the first day is that you're sleeping in your nice little hotel bed, when you awaken to the sounds of Porsche 928 V8's lighting up. Being a gearhead, I always like that.

Anyway, this is car day. So, after spending about an hour in the parking lot again (the picnic called for 10am) we headed up to the site on Grandfather mountain around 11ish. It was a really nice day out and a nice drive up.

We counted around 80 cars, though at one point I heard around 90 were there at one point or another. It was pretty cool that they lined them all up nicely instead of ad-hoc all over the place. It looked good. See our pics pages for some nice shots.

Got a chance to ogle Samantha's new gorgeous rare Iris Blue GTS. And of course she was really upset when someone else parked next to her with an identical car (aside from his being a 5spd and hers auto). The wheels on hers swayed me more toward her car, though his was cleaner.
She won the concours. I think the other one came in tied for second. Greg didn't enter his car since he won last year and didn't want anyone upset with him so he sat out. It would have been interesting to see those two go head to head, since his is in such pristine condition.

For lunch we had pulled pork and Jeannie's cocktail weenies in a good bbq sauce. Was pretty good.

After the picnic, it was time to go on a scenic mountain tour then on to dinner at a restaurant called Little Siena. It was pretty nice ride... mostly... We had many detours, knuckleheads driving half the speed limit on a motorcycle in front of us for miles and other various stuff. Unfortunately, we had one nasty incident where we were coming down the mountain with a 180 degree switchback hairpin turn coming up. I looked down and saw a van coming up and we were going to come really close to meeting. I said "VAN coming!", Dan slowed down but the van took the turn wide, forcing us to go wide as we entered the hairpin. Dan just rubbed the guardrail as the right tires hit a patch of gravel when we went wide. He did a masterful job, IMO, keeping the rest of the car out of that rail. I watched the whole thing go down and it could have been SO MUCH worse. That was one case where, there was nothing he really could have done. If he had wider tires or tighter suspension that might have helped but there just wasn't much he could do. Again... we were both safe and that's what's important. Everything else can be fixed with some cash. And he was SO lucky that it was just one small area and didn't take out the nose or spoiler. As it was there were a few other casualties: Someone hit a tree (not too much damage), another smoked his brakes (which, talk about gearheads... they were able to flush, fill and bleed new brake fluid on the side of the road, thanks to other gearheads), another had a timing belt light (water pump) and other misc small things. As a whole as hard as those guys were driving, not too bad. We got to the restaurant, showed off the 'badge of honor' and word quickly spread and reports kept coming in on who had what issues.

For dinner, Little Siena had a prime rib buffet set up for us. The managers took good care of us and for as many people as were there, maybe a hundred and fifty or so, they moved us pretty well. The food was good. The prime rib was ok, but I really liked the spicy shrimp pasta and spiced grilled mixed veggies. That and the red velvet cake was all it took to stuff me up.

After dinner most everyone headed over to Dave and Jeannie's compound. The ride over there was also scattered with a few detours. In fact there was one where we came up on a road closed section and a whole group of sharks turned around. we decided not to follow and to go into a the parking lot where all the locals were going and we decided to follow them, which led to another parking lot and out. Turned out the road was closed for only like 50' and we jumped right back on the highway and managed to beat the cars that turned around by around a half hour.
At the compound, people started working on cars right away and parking was pretty ugly. Kind of like concert grass parking. There were cars all over all the driveways and multiple lawn areas. I made it out to around 40 or so cars. We managed to get in behind two other cars on the feeder drive that led out which turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Some cars were buried 10 deep. We hung out for a while and after a couple hours decided to head back for the night around midnight. We heard some people were there till at least 3am, working on cars.

Pretty smooth drive back. Still didn't get to see one of the unmarked pickup trucks with the tonneau that lifted to show the mars lights. Though we did get hits of K band radar in places. On the last leg, Dan let the engine idle pretty much most of the way down the mountain keeping it at posted speed so we had no issues. I think I only heard of one 928 getting a ticket, and it WASN'T ME THIS TIME!!! Wahoo!

Pretty much did the same as the day before. Sat at the computer and promptly passed out before I could write anything.

Mike