The Best of Times

8-3

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The new day dawned, and I awoke somewhat disoriented, bewildered by my surroundings. You see, in past years I’ve stayed at the Sands downtown, which was… kinda run-down, but very endearing in a bunch of little ways. This year I had found an especially good deal on a room at the Grand Sierra so I had opted to stay there with my friends.

But boy, the Grand Sierra is a big change of pace.

Take my room, for starters. On the 22^nd floor – or was it the 25^th? Big plush bed, tall ceilings, swanky décor, marble tiled bathroom with a trendy waterfall shower, mirrors everywhere, tons of lighting. Very nice, very nice. A room currently strewn with my dusty, sweaty, well-used road trip clothes, but a very nice room nonetheless.

Step outside the room into an equally-plush hallway, step aside as a cleaning robot whirs past, and summon an elevator. There’s eight elevators that go to this floor, so it takes about two minutes for one to arrive, despite the massive number of hotel guests. Maybe another minute to get down to the lobby, depending on how many floors it stops at on the way down. In contrast, the Sands always had only one or two elevators functional (out of the available three), so it was actually pretty remarkable on the odd occasion when you could actually get down to the lobby from your room.

Step out of the elevators, and you’re swept up in a sea of people, no matter the time of day. Going to gamble, going to eat, going to a spa, going to check in, going to check out, going to go out for the day, going going going. The entire floor hums with energy, a myriad of conversations pelting in from all angles. The Sands? Well, attribute it to its dark “bear den aesthetic” or whatever you like, but humanity oozes through there on a slow complacent current. Calming. Easy.

Then there’s another critical difference: the acquisition of breakfast. There’s a buffet at Grand Sierra ($30+ for breakfast!!), a café, and a Starbucks. No real middle niche of cheap but freshly-cooked diner food, no greasy hashbrowns and salty crispy bacon and vaguely burnt coffee. The Sands? The Sands had Mel’s which was exactly that: your quintessential greasy spoon breakfast diner, and an old hot rodder’s classic at that.

Yeah, I really missed the Sands. I think it was just more my style.

I grabbed a breakfast sandwich at Starbucks – the only full breakfast costing less than $10 in the place – and headed out to the lot to see Jane. I had a situation to remedy – one unwittingly generated by yet another very big difference between the Sands and the Grand Sierra. At the Sands, the classic car lot is guarded by a bike cop and requires an entry tag to get in, but otherwise your access is unrestricted. People hang out and tailgate at all hours of the day and throughout most of the night, wrenching on their cars and shooting the shit. And I was used to taking advantage of that policy on the first night of every stay to clean Jane up – 10PM, 11PM, midnight, 1AM, no matter, I had the time.

It turns out that the Grand Sierra lot cops kick everyone out – EVERYONE – at 10PM. Don’t ask me why. No hanging out, no wrenching on your car, no cleaning, no nothing. Everyone out. Where are we supposed to go? Who knows, not their problem. All that’s left is the casino with its glittering lights and trumpeting machines.

So, Jane had been trapped in her Jekyll-and-Hyde guise for the night, as the cops had intercepted me and kicked me out shortly before I started on the second half.

Man, I really missed the Sands.

I spent an hour finishing up Jane’s makeover, during which quite a few people stopped by to comment on the car’s wretched appearance. The guy parked behind me handed me a fresh fancy shammy, saying, “Here, you’re going to need this.” I didn’t use it, knowing it would be ruined forever if used on the level of grime that I was dealing with.

But eventually, she came clean.

Jeff "Vana White"s for me

That's a damn shiny car

By that time the rest of the crew had arrived at the scene, and we congregated to decide on who was going where. Ultimately the majority of us decided on the swap meet, a great place to find useless (or occasionally useful) stuff that you never knew you needed. So we piled into the beater cars and headed over to the fairgrounds, leaving our Mustangs securely in their treasured parking spaces (still very silly, but also still very necessary).

We spent a few hours poking around at the swap meet – I found an interesting pair of copper header collector gaskets, and bought them on the off chance that they would help fix the exhaust leak that had cropped up in Arizona. But otherwise, not much interesting to be bought. The outdoor project-cars-for-sale lot had a bunch of overpriced junk for the most part. The indoor finished-cars-for-sale lot, on the other hand, had better prospects, with a lot of rare and beautifully built cars up for sale.

That lot always kind of breaks my heart, though. These aren’t the cars that have been neglected for fifty years, left in a ditch to rot. These are cars that have been treasured, carefully restored and maintained in beautiful condition by many hands for untold hours over the decades. Some have just been rescued and built by professional restorers, and are simply great examples of a car well-cared-for. But the ones that really break my heart are the ones that have stories. The ones that have a sign in the window explaining 70 years of single-family ownership, clear evidence that these people viewed themselves as stewards of a wonderful piece of machinery. The ones that have a photobook on the dash, maybe mostly just restoration photos but always having a few photos slipped in that belie the real human history behind the car, the friends and the family and the memories made with the car. I always wonder how it is that it has come to this. A car that became a treasured family heirloom, a member of the family, and then subsequently just something to sell at auction.

I don’t like thinking about this, because I don’t like thinking about what will happen to Jane when I am gone. Who will become her custodian? Will they care for her like I do? Will they sell her after one too many annoying moments?

Well. I am young. So these are things not to be thought about. I hoped that we would leave soon.

Fortunately our stomachs drove us away from there and towards better places: namely, barbecue! We headed to Brothers Barbecue, an award-winning joint close to the main drag. My large plate of meat-n-carbs (pulled pork and mac and cheese) pulled me out of my funk in no time. Let me tell you, being a Carolina girl living in Texas, I have really missed good pulled pork. For reasons I cannot fathom, Texas is just spectacularly bad at pulled pork. It’s an easy dish to make, but somehow they mess it up. So I was a little suspicious when I saw that Brothers claimed to be Texas BBQ. But the pulled pork plates I saw going past looked like a good approximation of the KC style, so I gave it a try. Delicious!

After lunch the crew wanted to go to the auction, but by that point I had had enough of that so I opted to stay behind. Instead, I walked a few blocks up to the downtown car show on the drag. By then it was a bit late in the afternoon so a fair amount of cars had cleared out, but being Hot August Nights, that still meant that there were a couple hundred left behind to drool over.

Looks like Mopar Alley to me! That's a lotta green.

I see this Impala every year, and every year I absolutely love it. What a beautiful car.

A beautiful '69 Mustang, although minus points for wearing nearly 20-year-old tires!

One of my favorite things about Hot August Nights is how it pulls the oddball cars out of the woodwork. Yeah, there’s still a million Mustangs and Camaros and Chevelles floating around – your standard pony- and muscle-car fare. But you also see all kinds of rare and crazy cars – like this Ford Thunderbolt, or a Jeepster!

If you don't know why this car is so spectacular, you should Google it.

After walking the rows for a while, I scooted inside to catch some air conditioning while doing a tour of the “Big Boy Toy Store”, an exhibition hall with a bunch of vendors all showcasing their latest and greatest go-fast shiny parts. I stopped by the SCE Gaskets booth in particular, as someone outside had recommended them to me as a place that might be able to advise me on the exhaust leak situation. Ryan, the owner of the company, was kind enough to put significant thought into helping me strategize the possible ways to keep the car from blowing the gasket again. He saw the copper collector gaskets I had bought at the swap meet earlier hanging on my belt (the best way to keep from losing things is just to tie them to myself, I’ve found, or I’ll walk off without them) and we had a chat about gasket thickness and getting them to conform to my very wonky, very crooked exhaust system without blowing out. I went away satisfied with a plan, and he promised to stop by my car tomorrow to see how things worked out.

My actual “work” complete, I caught an Uber back to the Grand Sierra, arriving with some time to spare to walk the lot there as well before meeting back up with the crew.

The most hot-roddy row of hot rods possible

An Opel! I know next to nothing about this car but it's awesome.

Hey, what a cool map in the back of this car! Oh wait, that's mine! Lol.

Points awarded for this Corvette being clearly driven, but taken away for the potty break it apparently took upon arrival.

Another no-no: dry rotted and horribly worn tires! Yikes.

One of the HAN award winners. Money talks here, and there is a LOT of it in this car.

Not quite my style though to be honest.

Now THIS though... THIS I could get behind! (And absolutely never afford, as this is another very high-end award-winning build)

Boy look at how perfect that paint is. I bet this car's never even driven to a gas station.

The whole venue was abuzz with energy – more of a kicked-beehive vibe though, rather than a cheerfully-busy kind of feeling. But that was to be expected, as it was Thursday night, the show was in full swing, and best of all, there was a pretty big free concert scheduled for the night’s entertainment. The Grand Sierra was the IT spot to be, for sure.

And there I sat with my friends, feeling very smug with our big raft of chairs plopped down at our block of parking spots, watching the endless stream of cars cruise past in their fruitless search for a parking spot. It made for a very nice kind of rolling car show, albeit one that had a bit of a tendency to periodically drown us in heady hydrocarbon-rich exhaust fumes.

The sun sank towards the horizon and still the cars streamed past. People began to migrate towards the stage, camp chairs in tow – only to find that there was nothing but standing room available. Feeling peckish, I started to wonder what we would do about food. It wasn’t long before I realized that given the size of the crowd milling around, there was probably a next-to-zero chance that we would be able to score a table at one of the sit-down places indoors. Well, okay, there’s plenty of food tents popped up around the margins of the car lot. I had a wander and came up with… a loaded baked potato. Can’t have a winning dinner all the time, I guess.

As Reno sank into darkness, the lights flared on, bathing us in the hard luminescent glow of stadium lights. Polished chrome glittered in an endless blanket of stars across the lot, outlining the countless unique shapes of vehicles spanning decades of time, decades of innovation. Heat radiated off of the baked tarmac and mingled with the cool night breeze. The hum of thousands of spectators, ambling through those warm currents, ran counterpoint to the rumble of vintage motors, a perfect duality. This is the essence of Hot August Nights. A series of fleeting moments of perfection, strung together through the days and coalescing every night.

And then, across the parking lot, the stage rang out with the strum of a single electric guitar. The concert was starting. And it’s not just any old cover band playing, or a local band, or some small-time act: it’s 38 Special, one of my favorite rock bands. I popped out of my seat and popped over to the stage to watch. Even though the stage sound isn’t perfect (the parking lot making for a less-than-ideal auditory setting), hey, it’s still a free way to see a huge band up-close!

I returned to the crew’s flotilla of camp chairs as the last note faded into the night, and we spent another hour or so hanging out before security booted us out again. Not before we made them take our picture, at least.

Look at how big our smiles are.

Kelly signing out.

The Importance of Traffic Management

8-2

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Another day, another timezone-induced early morning. Although, when I say “early” I mean, “I was dressed and somewhat ready for the day by 7:30AM”.

I ambled downstairs to the hotel restaurant, which professed to begin serving a full breakfast menu at 7AM. I proceeded to sit there for a full fifteen minutes while a man in the kitchen studiously ignored me. Fortunately, I had a great book to read so I didn’t really notice how much time had passed. Eventually, a woman arrived at the restaurant, plunked her stuff down, strapped on an apron, and came to take my order – hashbrowns extra crispy, please, two eggs, and some bacon. Your standard fare.

Twenty minutes later, a plate of the greasiest breakfast food I’ve ever encountered arrived at my table. It was somehow drowning in grease and completely unsalted. A winning combination! I ate it anyways, because I was hungry and have an insatiable desire for even the worst hashbrowns in the world some days.

So maybe you would think that today’s story would begin with some variety of food poisoning! But you would be wrong, because I am pretty indestructible when it comes to things like this. Although, I was still pretty grumpy.

I checked out of the hotel – which had otherwise been very pleasant – and shuffled all of my stuff outside and into a very wet Jane. Apparently, it had rained all night. Seems kind of weird for Nevada, really, but I’ll take the cooler weather any time.

We hopped on the road while the early morning showers were still departing, pursuing the last fleeing raindrops as the low-hanging clouds shielded us from the sun. A good way to start a moody morning.

We reached Vegas in short order, fortunately coming through after the bulk of the morning traffic had passed. So I guess in a way that delayed breakfast kind of worked out for the better, probably, because I had entirely forgotten to account for rush hour. I always do, because I’m very rarely in heavily populated areas when on these trips.

I have to say, opting to stay in Boulder City instead of Vegas this time around was a much better choice! If you want to find cheap accommodations in Vegas, you have to go to the Strip, with all of its traffic and tourists and valet parking and crowded lots and long elevator rides. And then the next morning you have to fight all of that in reverse to depart the Strip. In Boulder City, everything is a cheap accommodation, and you can park right outside your room. As an added bonus, you can also walk to dinner without getting robbed! Neat. Too bad it only took me seven years or so to figure that one out.

We sailed on through Vegas and hit the open road almost immediately, as is usually the case with towns and cities in Nevada. It always seems to me that Nevadan towns involve a concentrated effort from people to occupy as small an area as possible, with very few of the sprawling outskirts estates that you normally expect to see around towns. The reason for this is very obvious, of course: most of Nevada is inhospitable desert, and your giant McMansion on the city outskirts would have exactly 0 water and a great view of a very flat brown landscape with maybe some extra-brown mountains in the distance.

Of course, I’m being a bit facetious here, because there is quite a lot of beauty to be seen in the desolate Nevadan landscapes if you know where to look. As Jane and I cruised down the tarmac, navigating through intermittent belts of craggy hills amidst the broad plains, the heavy cloud cover gave way to wonderful puffy cotton candy affairs. Each presided over the scrubby landscape only briefly before dissolving into a trail of vapor. It was turning out to be a beautiful day.

The Area 51 Alien Center always merits a photo. Although, last time I drove past it advertised that it was a brothel, and I noticed that was not the case this time. Hmm.

The landscape grew a bit greener – certainly the greenest I’ve ever seen in Nevada – before subsiding back into scrubland. Joshua trees began to dot the landscape as I approached the Death Valley area.

Wide-open skies over a wide-open plain

Usually, even my brief foray through the edge of the hotspot in Beatty is enough to leave me toasted for the rest of the day. I don’t believe I’ve ever been there at a time when it’s less than 105*F. But this year, those wonderful little clouds gathered to periodically trickle a small drizzle down to earth, keeping the temperatures down. Man, I sure do love rain. In this context, at least.

We carried on like this for the majority of the day, ducking in and out of cloud cover as we arrowed across the plains towards Reno, drawn like an iron filing to a magnet. My speakers trumpeted out endless renditions of Iron Maiden’s vast discography, and I reveled in the joyful powerful noise of my existence in this little monster of a car.

Some days are just really, really good days.

This tall skinny cloud perfectly aligned with the road for quite some time and provided shade for many miles

Eventually I made it up into farmland, a sure sign that I was approaching Reno. My highway flight turned into a more meandering cruise, long fields of grain and other crops connecting small farming communities dense with homesteads amongst tall stands of trees.

It must have been harvest season – or nearing it – as I found traffic significantly slowed by various pieces of farm machinery trundling down the roads at their honest best 15 MPH. There were a few especially large machines that I was 100% sure that I could drive underneath successfully, but common sense took hold and I instead patiently waited in the line of traffic with everyone else, skipping ahead of the farmers one vehicle at a time in a very inefficient game of leapfrog.

I finally cleared the last of the larger farming communities – with all their associated traffic – at about 4PM. Perfect! I was an hour away from Reno, so I figured I’d arrive right at 5, and cruise right through as town emptied out at the end of the workday.

But as I kept driving, I noticed that my phone’s GPS kept saying “Time to Arrival: 1 hr”. I would drive 10 minutes, and it would say there was an hour remaining. I’d drive another fifteen minutes – and still an hour remaining. Hmmmmmm.

Well, it was all still smooth sailing until I got within 25 miles of my destination – at which point traffic (of which there was suddenly quite a lot) came to a complete standstill. In the middle of nowhere. Nothing but a brown rock gully and all of us crammed in it. Google Maps had no accidents to report, so I was very puzzled by the holdup. And annoyed. Here I was, theoretically less than half an hour away from my destination, and my phone was still reporting that I had an hour – or perhaps now an hour and fifteen minutes – to go. Arghhhhh!!!

This was all made worse by the speed of the traffic. Jane is just not equipped to drive at 2 to 5 MPH. So I sat there marinating in the sun – all of the previous clouds and goodwill having completely vanished – pumping the clutch and the gas and the brakes in various combinations to inch forward bit by bit. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. Twenty. Thirty. 5PM came and went, and still I sat trapped on this infernal road. Traffic stretched as far as I could see, both ahead and behind me. Of course, the other lane – the one leading out of town – was completely empty.

Remember how I was earlier noting that Nevada is kind of unique in that everyone does their best to live within city limits, as close to the center as possible? Yeah, I had forgotten about that. It turns out that when people leave work for the day in Reno, they leave the factories and foundries on the outskirts of town, and head INTO town to go home – the opposite from almost every other city in America! Fascinating, but extremely aggravating.

After five miles – and 45 minutes of time wasted – I came upon the traffic obstruction: a particularly poorly-designed onramp that, by virtue of its extreme curvature, required cars to enter the highway at about 15 MPH. And being a two-lane highway, and of course that onramp having very little merge room at the top, that meant that every single car on the highway entering that area would have to slow down to let people merge in, or face a pretty catastrophic wreck. Hello, completely unnecessary traffic.

Once I drove past that single onramp, traffic cleared up and things went right back to pleasant highway cruise conditions. But of course then I was simmering mad. I can do traffic if it’s because of a wreck or construction or SOMETHING. But traffic just because someone did a bad job engineering a road? The worst.

So instead of cruising casually-but-victoriously into Reno, pleased with ourselves over another long trip completed, Jane and I screamed into Reno at a rapid clip, all grumpy and growly, probably exuding pretty hefty punk rock vibes. We turned into the lot at Grand Sierra Resort – our home for the next three days – and were immediately directed to the back lot, possibly due to my scowl or possibly due to the horrifically thick layer of grime coating Jane. Well, whatever, the back lot is closer to registration anyways.

But as I pulled into the lot, it became very impossible to stay grumpy. Everywhere I looked, there were dozens – hundreds – thousands – of classic cars of all makes and models, ranging from the rattiest cobbled-together hot rods to the most pristine off-the-factory-floor classics to the most extravagant, grandiose custom cars. All gathered for this yearly event to celebrate the history of the automobile and our love affair with it. And here we were, Jane and I, once again. She always gets me here, through hell and high water.

I ran inside and picked up my registration packet, which gives Jane and I both access to all of the car shows and parking and cruises and drag races and auctions and everything else that comes with Hot August Nights. Then I headed out into the parking lot to find my friends – not a very difficult thing to do, considering they always park in the same spot! So I meandered down towards the Amsoil tent, stopping to admire various hot rods. The lot was absolutely slammed – both with cars and with people! It seems that turnout has fully rebounded following the covid years.

I found my crew posted up behind a hot rod featuring two side-by-side engines and four blowers. You know, your usual Hot August Nights fare. They were amusing themselves by giving completely wrong answers to the odd stranger who stopped by to ask about the car (which was owned by someone else entirely). It didn’t take much to convince them that we should go to dinner instead. So off we went.

We spent dinner strategizing over steaks. Why strategizing? Well, Hot August Nights being such a huge event, parking can come at a premium wherever you might think you want to go. The Grand Sierra Resort is one of the major nexuses of the event, as it hosts all of the free concerts and has the largest parking areas – with the most competition for a parking spot. So you kind of don’t want to lose all of your crew’s parking spaces if you’ve got em. But then you find yourself tied down to your spot and unable to go visit other parts of the event, which of course is no fun at all either. And that’s why it’s a good thing that half of our crew brings extra “beater” cars to putter around town in. We leave the Mustangs in the Grand Sierra lot, and drive the Corollas to the museum and the auction and the downtown car show. In some ways that kind of defeats the purpose of a week-long cruise-oriented car show, but when your main priority is hanging out with your friends, it’s the best way to make sure you all have somewhere to congregate.

I began to feel as if I had spent the day attending a course on traffic management.

After a lengthy dinner, we retired back to the cars where we set out the camp chairs for a long session of bullshitting with each other. I scored a spot for Jane two spots down, and spent some time cleaning her up while chipping in with pithy remarks when conversation got loud enough for me to join. Even though I hate to miss out on even a single minute of the fun, I also hate to leave Jane grimy and ratty while she’s parked amongst the perfectly manicured show cars. It makes me feel like I’m neglecting her. There’s no doubt that we are meant for the road, which comes with a certain level of grime, but I don’t know, I guess I’d be self-conscious if I showed up to a black tie event covered in mud, so I assume the same goes for Jane. So I always make an effort to polish her up and put a nice shine on her so she fits in with the rest of the cars in the lot.

I call these Jane's "Angel Wings". When driving through pouring rain the dust often gets swept back on the corners of the windshield like this. A fun lesson in the aerodynamics (hydrodynamics???) of the car.

Per my usual habit, I cleaned only half of the car first so I could take a photo comparing Jane’s two faces: the road warrior, and the show pony. I call it the “Jekyll and Hyde” look. It’s a great way to really highlight how many miles of road I had to drive to get here.

As I worked, a desert night breeze wafted in, carrying the sounds of camaraderie towards me on its cool currents. Laughter and excited conversation echoed across the lot as friends from all walks of life and all corners of the country were reunited with each other, all bursting with new stories and adventures to share. The familiar click of ratchets and the clang of metal on metal drew curious bystanders to various cars like moths to a flame, witnesses to the ongoing reality of keeping the classic cars alive. And underneath that ran the strongest pulse of all: the thump-thump-thump of vintage V8 motors creeping through the lot, the growl of performance exhaust on a hot rod cruising through town, the howl of a wide-open throttle on the highway.

The sounds of a hobby, a community, a passion, alive and well. I’m proud to be a part of it.

Kelly signing out.