Ok, so I’m finally home from AKA Rally 2007 - Salt Lake City to Atlantic city. The trip actually started a week and a half (or so) before hand while preparation. started months before. I was scrambling to get my e34 wagon ready to go while everyone else was doing last minute pre rally preparation. It came down to me constantly saying I needed “one more day” and everyone who was traveling out west with me going “Ok, no big deal”. Well, due to an incorrect pressure plate being sent to me, the wagon never made it, so my father graciously loaned me his e46 330i Auto, open diff, winter beater. (This decision was made at 3am the day we were supposed to leave). Around 5pm that day I finally got on the road to meet up with Chris (who runs AKA Rally), Dr. John, and Chris’ brother Dan. The 3 of them had already been on the road for quite some time in an e46 M3 Competition and were meeting me in Columbus.
Anyway, we drove out, stayed in the Grand Canyon for a night, tooled around through some national parks and made our way to Vegas for a few days. The original plan was to drive down through Tail of the Dragon and make our way out to Napa Valley and Cali but due to my dicking around with the e34 we didnt make it.
Here is a pic of John’s M3
And the silver 330i I drove out.
We proceded to Zion national park, and through a few others while we were there, but we were a bit crunched for time as we still had to pick up Chris’ M5 (in Vegas) on the way to the start of the rally. We ended up going through 20 miles or so of the most ridiculous twisties ever right after Zion National park, just absolutely insane switchbacks and high speed sweepers, in which the ///M couldnt shake me, hehehe. We then got out onto the highway with some high speed, 8% grade downhill sweepers through a canyon, which were insane.
We ended up in Vegas at Planet Hollywood where to our pleasant surprise they were doing a photoshoot with 20 or so models down on the pool deck every morning. Thank you long lense. Eventually my codriver PT arrived and we headed over to the penthouse at the Vanitian right on the Blvd.
That basically sums up the drive out. I’m going to do a few short write ups on the next few days, but it was a large blur so it’s probably going to take me a few hours to think of stuff and match it to photos.
You can check out the rest of the drive out gallery here:
http://www.akarally.com/gallery2/v/aka2007/driveout/