Kool April Nites 2008!

[RacnJsn95]

We had another successful trip to Kool April Nites this year. No one (really) broke down, and I'd say we all had a bunch of fun! I took over 820 pictures, so I'm only going to show you pictures of the cars we took down along the way, because it would just be way too much hassle to go through all of the pictures and edit them to be internet friendly. I'll start from the beginning...

 

Thursday, I spent about 3 hours cleaning the Camaro up. I pretty much gave up cleaning it because everytime I would wash it, as soon as I would get done and walk in my house, "my Dad's cats" (they are strays that came with the house) would walk all over it, and leave muddy foot prints... Since this was a special occasion I decided to clean it up, and for some unknown reason the cat's decided to stay off of it until I could leave town...

 

Here is the Camaro on Friday morning before I left town on the trek down to Redding

 

The drive down was thankfully uneventful, with the exception of a few people that pissed me off resulting in a couple full throttle bursts down the freeway to get away from them. The Camaro is about impossible to take good pictures out of, but I was able to get a couple neat photos on the way down...

I managed to get this out of the Camaro as I was passing the Ambassador

 

Here's some history on the Ambassador for you: My great Grandfather bought the car brand new, and my uncle got it when he passed away. It's a 1967 American Motors (Rambler) Ambassador DPL. It's completly unrestored, all original. In the last 20 years my Uncle has only driven it about 100 miles, the rest of the time it's been stored in his garage. If you know anything about cars, you can see why I'm so happy that the car made it there and back without breaking down, or loosing a seal and dumping tranny fluid/oil all over the road... It's got just over 100k original miles.

 

Anyway, the drive went fine, and nothing bad happened. We stopped at the normal rest area, and I took the opportunity to take a few pictures, this being one of them:

The Camaro and the Ambassador at a rest stop by Dunsmuir, CA

 

After taking a couple minutes to relieve ourselves, we continued on to Redding. I went to my motel to check in and drop my stuff off, then went to meet my Uncle and his girlfriend at their motel. Uncle Dave decided to wash the Ambassador to get the bugs and crap off the front...

Uncle Dave washing the Ambassador

 

Look's pretty good for 41 year old paint, eh? As you can imagine the Ambassador got a lot of attention, because (A) no one has ever seen one, and (B) No one knew who made it; so a lot of people got to hear my Uncle explain to them that it was a Rambler, and that my great Grandfather had bought the car brand new in 1967.

 

We walked a couple miles around Hilltop Dr. and through all the parking lots looking at rad cars parked there, then we watched the cruise, and I took quite a few pictures. I'd put some up, but there are so many that it would be pointless. After the cruise, before we went to dinner we went back to my Uncle's motel room, and I took the opportunity to catch a few pictures of the Ambassador and the Camaro after dark.

 

We waited for my Uncle's girlfriend's friend(?)(Holly) to show up, and we walked down to Cattleman's (a local nice(?) resturant) to have dinner. Dinner was great, and afterwards we walked back to the motel to retrieve the Camaro, which we took to the Red Lion to check out the bar, which we heard was hoppin', but really wasn't, so once my uncle walked down there to meet us, Holly and I attempted to find somewhere that had a kareoke setup, because I felt like singing, but we were both lost, and eventually decided to go to the local casino, where I lost all my money ($1.00), and she managed to turn $3.00, into $15.00... I know what games to play next time!

 

I dropped her off at her rig back at my Uncle's motel, and then went to mine, where I had planned on sitting in the hot tub for a while, but unfortunetly it was closed, so I passed out from exhaustion in my room... I got up the next morning and packed up all my crap, and headed over to my Uncle's motel so we could venture over to the show. Here's a pic I took of the Camaro, and the Ambassador that morning while my Uncle was packing up:

 

 

We went to the show, and eventually Holly met up with us for the last field of cars to walk through. My Uncle and his girlfriend elected to leave at about 12:30, but I wasn't ready to make the drive yet (as a matter of fact, I was trying to talk my uncle into staying another night, but he wasn't having it), so I stayed behind with Holly, and we went through some more of the cars. Before leaving to have lunch before I took off.

 

There was only 2 Datsuns this year. A 240z, and a 521:

 

 

 

If you've been watching the news earlier in the week, you'd have known there was supposed to be a huge snow storm on Saturday, so I was pretty sketched out, debating whether I should leave or not. I'm sure you can imagine that the Camaro doesn't drive worth a flying fuck in the the snow! I finished my lunch, and darted out at about 3:00pm.

 

Nothing exciting happened on the drive home... I do have a personal story I may tell close friends that had to happen on the way home (and no, I wasn't beating off or anything like that you sickos!)... I didn't hit real snow until I got over the siskyous and into Phoenix, so that was good...

 

Another Kool April Nites trip got through with flying colors! In the near future, I'll probably put some of my favorite Kool April Nites photos up in an album on my space, so watch out for them.

 

I forgot to mention that the Camaro got 26.558 mpg for the trip. The thing gets kick ass mileage on the freeway! However, the Ambassador doesn't appear to get such good mileage, as it ran out of gas at the top of the Siskyou summit. By some stroke of luck my Uncle was able to coast the car down from the top of the mountain, all the way into Ashland to his buddie's Shell station... Scary.

[purple]

Darn, I didn't know you were coming down. I was at work during the show though. You could have met the Kamikaze Kustom (my 59 Datsun). I live right off I-5 north of town.