For those of you who don't know the previous story of when we were at a Good Guys nostalgia race in Las Vegas I'm going to tell you. Lucky you! Now when I think of Vegas I think desert, and when I think desert I sure don't incorporate huge, large, nasty bugs with the hot dry desert. I was proven wrong.
It was really late for our last qualifying run of the day, close to midnight. We were in line waiting for some door bangers to finish up when the lights started to dim a little bit. Then they started to dim a lot, and slowly we started to notice people scurrying away in every direction. Then, women start to squeal as if they were in pain, and in a matter of seconds the entire Las Vegas race facility was being taken over by an alien life form known as Cicada. Notice in the description how it keeps saying "LARGE size" and notice it has wings! Wings the size of a Boeing jet I swear! And then imagine thousands of those bugs with Boeing size jet wings flying around you like one of those cash prize machines where the dollar bills are flying every where and you have to try and get as much in your pockets before the time is up. Well I sure didn’t put any of the Cicada in my pocket that night, at least not by choice.
Ron was strapped in the car at this time ready for his run…guess what, Ron doesn’t like bugs, more so the kind with 8 legs, but hey, a bug is a bug. We tried covering the cockpit to keep the Cicada out, until it was his turn to qualify. Luckily, Ron likes racing a lot more then bugs, but the officials were tempted to stop the race because if you can imagine what happens to a drag strip when hundreds of LARGE bugs get ran over on the asphalt…I’m thinking a slip ‘n slid is the best way to describe this.
Officials let us run, we qualified really well, and when we got to the end of the track to pick Ron up the dragster was blanketed in bug juice. “How’d that taste Ron?”
So I’m guessing the Cicada thing could be classified as a natural phenomenon of some sort since we heard through the grape vine that the Cicada ONLY come out like that once every 10 years or so…lucky us! But when we thought we couldn’t get any luckier we hit the jack pot with another natural phenomenon yesterday when arriving at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Mother Nature saw us coming from miles away and now we get to check something else off of our “What to Experience Before You Die List.” Yesterday she delivered us right in the middle of a Salt Storm! Don’t be jealous, you only wish you were as lucky as us.
Between the salt, 40mph winds, people being swept off their feet as if they were a woman being sung a solo by Frank Sinatra, and objects in the pits being turned into projectiles, somehow we managed to get the salt car to tech. And it PASSED! The rookie car Salty, who was so feverishly created by Ron, Matt and Chet is going to see its day up in the lights. Keep those land speed record fingers crossed for us because Ron and the team will be seeing what Salty can do starting tomorrow, Saturday.
Hey Mother Nature you can’t stop us, we’re looking to catch Salt Fever!
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