Toyotafest 2017 Recap

[immorality]

Day 1, Tuesday May 2nd

The basic plan was to blast down I5 for the first two days and then have a more leisure third day of driving where we could hit up some more interesting twisties. Things don’t always go according to plan (like last year), but having a rough idea is always good, especially if it does happen to work in your favour once in a while, law of averages I suppose.

An early start to the day, I think I left the house around 5:30am. Arrived in Blaine around 6 to meet up with Duncan and top off the tank.



Traffic slowed down a bit through Everett, and wasn’t too bad through Seattle, which was nice because it was getting close to morning rush hour. First stop was Griot’s Garage in Tacoma around 9, which is when they opened. This is their main headquarters, and it’s a mecca of automotive detailing. The best part is seeing which cars Richard Griot is showing from his collection. There are always 6-10 great cars on display and rotate, so they are different every time I've been there.





Plenty of highway miles,



Here’s something you don’t see every day, a Subaru Brat, and a minty 80’s Camry!



Lots of I5,





We made it to the town of Mt.Shasta around 6pm or so. It was a good day of driving and once we were out of the Seatac area, traffic was minimal.

[immorality]

Day 2, Wednesday May 3rd

We found the Mt.Shasta Pastry shop, a great place for breakfast and treats!




Driving through northern California, it was nice to see the water levels so high around Shasta Lake. A couple of years ago coming through here there was so much of the banking visible that it was actually disturbing to see.





You know what you don’t see every day, a Subaru Brat. This is weird, two Brat’s in two days. I couldn’t tell you the last time I saw one before this!



Again with the water, there are crops! Also, I’ve never seen water under the bridge between Woodland and Sacramento before.





At Sacramento we split off of I5 and onto the 99 South for a different view. I think this gas stop was somewhere around Bakersfield. It was hot as balls. Duncan said that the outside temp gauge in his car read 37°C. At this point the vinyl wrap on my rear view mirror started peeling away from the edges.


From Bakersfield we headed east on Hwy 58 (past the turnoff to Willow Springs Raceway and towards Edwards Air force base) and then onto 395. There are a couple of hills at the beginning of 58, where you can see the wind farm and then it becomes proper desert.

[immorality]

Day 3, Thursday May 4th

We spent the night in Victorville. Thanks to Duncan’s flirting with the very nice and well endowed innkeeper we received a free upgrade to a suite! I had no idea that Motel6 had suites.



As mentioned in the beginning, our third day and the reason we detoured east was to try out some roads around Lake Arrowhead and Big Bear Lake. Google it, the roads are awesome! We took the 15 down to 138 through Crestline, then the 18 and the 330 back towards San Bernadino. While driving through Crestline, I saw this yellow MR2 parked on the side of the road. I noticed that it was a ‘94+ and pulled over immediately to check it out (and look like a crazy person).




It was a genuine ’94 NA, auto, just like I had started with. As we were looking at it a lady came out of the hair salon and chatted us up. Wendy was quite a passionate owner and was happy to talk ‘2’s for a while. Duncan managed to score her number too! She said something about trying to buy a center storage console from him, but I’m sure she wanted more.




Once we started to see civilization we drove the 210 (boring) towards the Mt.Baldy turn off. We drove up the hill towards the mountain. Mt.Baldy was certainly not our destination, our plan was to drive Glendora Mountain Road (GMR). It’s quite well know in Socal as a great twisty piece of tarmac. You can tell by this sign that word has already gotten out.



When you start from Baldy, you are actually on Glendora Ridge rd, and this is a big sketchy because it’s super tight (awesome), but it’s quite narrow (bad) and there’s no center line (also bad), so, people (that you can’t see) coming from the other direction are always driving in the middle of the road (very bad)! There was also a bunch of road work going on and large dump trucks driving the road. Once we got to the intersection with Glendora mtn rd started things got better. This had a centerline, but god damn was it a tight and crazy road. The few little spots that opened up I managed about 40mph. What a great rollercoaster ride! After that, we stopped for a cold drink and some air conditioning before heading towards the hotel. Martin managed to Airbnb the owners suite in a little motel. It had a big living room & kitchen, a bedroom with a queen bed and then a second bedroom with two double bunks (so, four beds). It worked out quite well despite the single bathroom.

I took off to LAX to pick up Sonja and by the time I got back Marc & Minna had come and gone, and then Martin showed up! I guess he had enough of me hassling him about making the trip down. Drew arrived a little later that night after visiting his cousin in San Jose.

[immorality]

Day 4, Friday May 5th

Our prep day. We headed out to get the cars washed. Our usual hang out is $1 car wash in Long Beach.









Once we were all shiny, we stopped by Cabe Toyota and met up with Kevin & Gord and picked up our Toyotafest registrations. We grabbed a bite, In’n’Out of course, and then headed to the Toyota Museum.



Then to the annual Toyota Museum Open house.





The museum doesn’t change much, so I just did a quick lap and called it. The others had been there before as well so they weren’t far behind. We all headed out around the same time. Gord & Kevin split, the rest of us headed back to the hotel. We still had a bunch of daylight so we did a little more pre-show detailing.



And a beer or two by the pool despite the overcast skies,



Seeing as it was Cinco de Mayo, we had to have Mexican for dinner! Don't mind Duncan, he was having a moment of silence for Randy, since he had to stay behind.

[immorality]

Day 5, Saturday May 6th

Show day!
The new location loomed large as we pulled closer. The gates for show car entry opened at 6:45am, and we were there right on time, but even then there were already hundreds of cars. They had us lined up in a pre-staging area to keep traffic off the streets, and we waited there for a couple of minutes until we figured out what was going on, and they started moving us toward the proper show grounds.




Judges,



There are tons of show pictures around, the TORC website has at least one photo of every single car!


Martin was pretty pleased with his recognition again this year, a job well done for someone that decided to come right at the last minute!





Near the end of the day, I has two Japanese guys come up and talk to me about the car. They asked me if I could stay a little bit after the show, they wanted to take some pictures and ask some more detailed questions so they could put together an article, neat!




Post show Drew, Martin, Sonja & I headed out to a brewery called Bottle Logic. It was a cool little craft brewery with some great beers. You might as well try as many as you can while you’re there!



It was a super long day, with the early morning,

[immorality]

Day 6, Sunday May 7th

The Petersen. This museum is always a treat. There’s nothing like it, and if you’ve never been before it’s definitely a bucket list item. You have to do the vault tour if it’s your first time. This year they had a Ferrari exhibit and a Bugatti family exhibit.

Here’s just a small taste of some of the cars,







We left the Petersen and had lunch at an Irish pub up the street. From there Kevin & Gord booked it to the airport, and then I took Sonja there a little later. The rest of the day was pretty relaxed. Went out for dinner with a friend and the rest of us just had a few beers at the hotel and some monstrous stuffed pizza thing that Martin picked up.

[immorality]

Day 7, Monday May 7th

Today was our last day in LA. We had a nice leisure morning for once, and tried to let traffic settle a bit (lol) before heading out. Martin, Drew and I stopped for gas in Santa Monica before heading into the canyons. We had a slightly modified route as I missed one of our turns, and then we lost Martin near the snake on Mulholland, but we regrouped and were able to do the snake again in the other direction. Of course we had to do Latigo Canyon road, that’s always one of my favourites. As usual we stopped at Neptune’s Net for lunch and to meet up with Duncan, Minna, Marc & his parents who came down in their Corolla.






After Neptune’s we headed northwest, through Ventura and up to Ojai and Hwy33, another favourite of previous years. We did the good part of 33 before it totally straightens out, and back onto I5 up to Sacramento.

[immorality]

Day 8, Tuesday May 7th

We did Sacramento to Eugene, OR. Mostly just highway today, we did have to stop in Redding for another dose of In’n’Out. We made it up to Eugene for the late afternoon. Usually we stay at the Super8 in the south of town and have Tracy (from Lithia fame) come and join us for dinner at Hops brew pub across the street. Since we arrived earlier than usual this time, Tracy and his wife Kristen graciously offered to have us all over for a backyard BBQ at their place. Martin got a little carried away playing with stuff he found in the garage, and Tracy gave Minna a lesson in historic muscle cars with manual steering and brakes.

[immorality]

Day 9, Wednesday May 7th

I swear the last leg of this trip is always the worst. We did fine leaving Eugene and missed the usual Portland traffic and even did reasonably well through Tacoma, but that Seattle traffic is a killer. We stopped at Southcenter mall for Jollibee for a quick bite and then made the rest of the way home. We got in early enough that we could stop at home for a few hours before the coffee meet. We then regaled our fellow club members with tales of the open road...

[2-yota]

Nice! Looks like an awesome event to have been a part of.

[Bravo 5]

Well told story Russ. I always tell myself I'm going to make one of these far off Toyota meets but never do. My kids are small and I wouldn't want to drag them along on a long road trip. Plus I hate driving long distances!

Who's 89 sc is that from the coffee meet? Looks almost completely stock.

[immorality]

You could always fly down for the weekend Dan. Down Friday and back either Sunday or Monday. The SC with the white wheels belongs to Bad Randy and the one to the right of it belongs to Matt.