The Best of Times

8-3

----------

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.