I thought I'd post a few of my favorite moments from the meet. This is by no means all of them, as I pretty much enjoyed every last minute of it, but these stand out:
Meeting a ton of new members. Half the people there had never been to one of our meets before. One person surprised us all by showing up unannounced, having never registered on any of these sites. Excellent!
When I pulled up last to the staging area for the drive, and saw for the first time how big a group 11 cars actually makes for a drive. Not only that, but everyone was out of their cars taking pictures and having conversations. It was all I could do to get the drive back underway! Never seen such enthusiasm in our group before!
Seeing 10 pairs of matching headlights in my rear view mirror (later 11), and all that beautiful sheet metal snaking out behind me, sometimes taking up 2 or 3 curves at once it was so long.
That first stomp of the pedal when I was sure we were all lined up and pulling out of the first town. We went under that little railroad bridge at around 20mph and came out into the first curve at full throttle. Surprise!
The looks we got every time we paraded down another small town main street.
The deer trotting along in front of us and the bald eage circling above us when we got to the lake. I didn't actually plan those, nor did I guarantee the incredible (for NW November) weather. Someone likes us.
The group lunch. I'm so glad I made that last minute change so everyone could sit down together. It felt like a big family sitting down to eat, even though half of us had never met anyone else at the table until a couple hours before. The food was great too, and the restaurant giving us our own room worked out perfect. I hope everyone tipped our waitress.
When we pulled into Stanwood and Allen gets out of the car next to me, looks around at the pretty boring looking town, and says, "And why are we stopping here??" A few minutes later, I spot a pool hall named "Gargoyle's Billards", run over to tell Allen, and soon after I am redeemed.
The last leg of the tour where we got to really open it up for a while, until we got stuck behind a slow car. Turned out to be just a chance for the rest our field to catch up to the leaders, so that a few minutes later the entire field of SVXes could pass the slow car together. It was fun, but I almost would give it up for a chance to be in that other car to see and hear what they did!