Gilroy and Morgan Hill

Today we had a pretty late start, heading out for lunch a little after midday and then heading down to the outlet stores in Gilroy for a little shopping.



After we finished up at Gilroy, we headed to Morgan Hill where we met up with David and Nicole to check out their property in the hills overlooking the town. This is a pretty steep property on the side of a large hill, and this in turn means that it has some awesome views of the valley, lake and town laid out in front of it, which only get better the higher up you go.



About half way down the property, is a Divco van that David has been trying to identify, mostly because he'd like to get it off the property and into someone else's hands, but in order to do that he needs to properly identify it, including locating some sort of identification, such as a VIN or chassis number. These vans were also built in a very similar body style for well over 20 years, making picking the actual year of production quite a challenge. This particular van was fitted with some sort of flathead 6 cylinder motor, fitted with an updraught carburettor and appears to have most recently been used as a dry cleaning van. However, we've been unable to find any information on the company "New Process Laundry and Dry Cleaners" who's name appears on the side of the van, although a new clue did turn up tonight, with a much smaller logo for "Gallager co" and the text SF 510. 510 being an area code for part of the Bay Area, this could indicate that the company that painted the vehicle was from the Bay Area.



After heading back to the top of the property, we drove down to Morgan Hill, picked up the Cadillac, which we'd left back in civilisation in case there wasn't enough room to turn the big old girl around at the top, and grabbed some gelato before heading back to David and Nicole's for the night.



Tomorrow we're off to the GoodGuys West Coast Nationals in Pleasanton and will drop in to John's 1/4lb Char Burger in Livermore to catch the weekly cruise in there.

Time To Head For The Salt

After our overnight stop in Beaver, Utah, we headed on north towards the cities of Wendover (Utah) and West Wendover (Nevada) and the Bonneville salt flats. The state border is in the middle of the town, resulting in a very small town with 2 post offices, a handful of casino's on the Nevada side, and not much more to offer to the casual tourist. There are actually more things to do in Wendover than just gamble and race on the salt, but I suspect 99% of visitors to the town would never discover that.



The flight crews that flew the Enola Gay and Bockscar B29 Bombers to Hiroshima and Nagasaki trained at Wendover, and there's a small museum at the former air force base explaining some of the history of the area. There's also a local drag strip, but neither of these were the primary reason for our visit to the Wendover area.



Racers have been chasing land speed records at Bonneville since 1914, and the Southern California Timing Association have been running 2 events a year for many years now, one of those being August's SpeedWeek event. This year, over 500 teams entered for SpeedWeek, including 200 rookie teams. This was also the first time for me at SpeedWeek, and I had been looking forward to it since making the decision to come here almost a year ago.

Petersen Auto Museum and Wally Parks NHRA Museum

Today was our first full day in Los Angeles and we spent the day visiting the Petersen Automotive Museum and the Wally Parks NHRA Museum. After having breakfast at the diner in our hotel, we headed out to the Petersen Automotive Museum on Wilshire Boulevard. The Petersen is a multi level museum with over 300,000 square feet of display space. The museum even includes a couple of cool displays in the carpark to get you started. We spent a couple of hours here checking out all the cars on display and then headed on to the next stop of the day.



The next stop was the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum, all the way over the other side of town at the Pomona Fairplex. The Wally Parks houses displays from a number of motorsports disciplines, including drag racing, land speed racing and road racing. If that doesn't sound good enough already, the first Wednesday of the month, the Wally Parks hosts a cruise in for local hot rodders and customisers, with around 500 cars dropping in to the front carpark over the afternoon and evening.



We also caught up with some of the Cranksters, who were in Los Angeles until this evening, heading straight from the Wally Parks to the airport to fly out to Louisville. We'll catch up with them again before the trip is over. When we pulled out of the Wally Parks carpark, we headed over to nearby San Dimas to check out the Circle K that featured in Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure.



We then decided to head back to the hotel for the night, with the intention of stopping somewhere along the way for dinner. After pulling off the interstate and taking some of the suburban roads for a bit of variety on the way home, we managed to make it all the way back to the hotel without passing anything that really grabbed our attention, so we parked the Cadillac in the carpark, put all our gear back in the room and walked across the road to get some Mexican food for dinner. While waiting for our dinner I wandered a little way down the road to grab a few photos of some neon signs, then we headed back to our rooms to eat dinner and discuss our plans for tomorrow, while I made a start on sorting the days photos.

Nine Sleeps To Go

We're now into the single digits of the countdown to The Bonneville Run, with only 9 more sleeps to go. We have booked all the accommodation from when we leave San Jose on the 3rd of August until we depart Bakersfield after the Famoso Raceway Summer Nationals.

Along the way we'll be spending a few days in Los Angeles, checking out the Petersen Automotive Museum, the Wally Parks NHRA Museum, visiting the Moon Eyes shop and the Bobs Big Boy in Downey. We're also planning on getting to a Dodgers game while we're in town and have a few other things on the list as well.

After we leave Los Angeles, we're off towards Las Vegas, taking time out to stop in at Bakersfield and Death Valley along the way. We have hotel rooms booked in Beatty, Nevada, just a little way outside Death Valley and only a couple of miles from the Rhyolite Ghost Town, which I intend to visit around sunset and hang around to take a few night photos.

In Las Vegas, we've booked a couple of nights at the Bellagio hotel and casino, home to the famous dancing fountains. We haven't made many plans for our time in Las Vegas yet, but will sort that out a little more while we're on the road. Once we leave Las Vegas, we are spending a night in a cabin on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and then heading north to Bonneville.

The Bonneville Salt Flats are located just outside the town of West Wendover, on the border of Utah and Nevada. They are home to the fastest land based motorsport on the planet, with many world land speed records being set here. We arrive in town on the Friday of the Southern California Timing Associations SpeedWeek event.

We have hotel rooms booked in West Wendover though till Tuesday morning, which is when we say goodbye to the salt and head onwards with the road trip. We have rooms booked on the southern shores of Lake Tahoe and at historic Wawowa hotel in California's Yosemite National Park. After we leave Yosemite, we're headed onwards to Bakersfield and the Famoso Auto Club's Famoso Raceway, home to the ANRA's Summer Nationals, a huge 2 day Nostalgia drag race meeting.

After we leave Bakersfield, we're probably going to make a few things up as we go along, thats where the booked accommodation runs out for now, unless we decide to add a few nights somewhere else as well. We are planning on getting to John's Charburger in Livermore for a Friday night cruise in the weekend after Bakersfield, and there's also a GoodGuys show in Pleasanton that weekend, so we might hit that up as well. I'd also like to head back down to Santa Cruz and Monterey, and perhaps spend some more time around that area, maybe as an overnight trip during the week, instead of going back and forth each day.

While we're back in North California's Bay Area, I'd love to get to the San Francisco 49ers' preseason game against the San Diego Chargers on the 2nd of September, and there are a number of things around the San Francisco area that I'd like to see, both things we didn't know about last time and things that we went and saw last time, but I'd like to see again. We'll nut out some of those ideas over a few drinks while we're on the road and come up with some sort of game plan at a later date.

At either end of the trip, we also have a lengthy stop over in Auckland, New Zealand, between flights, and on the way across, we've booked a hire car for the day and will spend some time exploring Auckland before returning to the airport to wait for our flights to San Francisco.