Our Caravan to
Vettes On The Rockies (VOTR) 2006
Day 14: Friday, July 28, 2006
Breckenridge, Colorado
Now that Buzz and Jackie are in Breckenridge, the three-car caravan is once more intact.
The Vettes On The Rockies event for today is a "gimmick" rally. This is an untimed event and scoring is done in "gimmicky" ways. The Rally starts from the Beaver Run Resort (where the Nielsens and Floyds are staying, just down the hill from our condo at Grand Timber Lodge) with cars starting a minute apart beginning at 8:00am. You could decide to start at any time between 8:00a and 11:00a. At dinner last night, we agreed to meet at Beaver Run about 9:15a and start the Rally together at 9:30a. Dennis and Leslie Stepanik (our friends from San Antonio) elected to go at the same time.
Gael and I got to Beaver Run a little early to do some shopping in the Merchandise Room. We scored a shirt for me and a pair of sweatshirts, one for each of us:
VOTR has three major prizes that will be drawn tomorrow night. You can win a set of Goodyear tires for your Corvette, a pair of round-trip tickets anywhere that Southwest Airlines flies, or a driving course at Spring Mountain Driving school.
You get one ticket for each prize drawing in your registration packet, but you could also buy a "wing-span" of additional tickets for any of the drawings, $10 for enough tickets to reach from fingertip to fingertip. That's what these guys are doing (none too happily, it seemed to me). "My wing-span is bigger than your wing-span..."
We ran into Janet Curran again and I managed to get a better picture of her (of course, Gael looks great in any photo):
Shopping done, here we all are at 9:15a ready to queue up for the Rally:
Left to right: Ron, Robin, Chaz, Gael, Leslie, Dennis, Jackie and Buzz
As we were having our photo (above) taken by a passing stranger, two old friends wandered up. This is John and Bev Pribicevich from New Zealand. They'd been guests in our home when they came stateside to pick up their 1953 Commemorative Edition Corvette #79:
Though they were here at VOTR without their Corvette, I'm still betting they get the trophy for "having come the farthest for VOTR".
Today, Gael's the driver and I'm the navigator. They gave us our instructions and off we went. The course from Breckenridge is about the route we drove yesterday so it was pretty familiar territory. Since there's no timing at all, we enjoyed the scenery as I read off the instructions. Though we left a couple of cars before Dennis and Leslie, the dot in the road ahead is them in their Corvette having passed us, handily, at speed:
I mentioned that everywhere you look in Colorado is a postcard; here's a few:
Those are ski trails down the mountainside (Lyric from "Moonlight in Vermont"..)
This is Brenda and Dick Brazelle in their beautiful '60 with C4 running gear
Dennis and Leslie departing the reservoir checkpoint
Buzz and Jackie departing
Off we went to the next checkpoint:
This photo by Sandy Swift
The next checkpoint consisted of another photo op (where the organizers took the photos in hopes of selling them to us), and three games you could play to score points (this, along with the reservoir question is how the Rally winner is determined.
While we were waiting for our turn to be photographed, we saw Len and Marga Atlas in their Mag Red C6. We knew them when they lived in South Carolina years ago; now they live in Oregon:
Just in case we don't like the one the professionals took, we'll have this one:
There were three games to play, two of them were under marquee tents:
In one game you rolled a handful of dice and your score for that game was twice the point value on the dice.
Another game (which we thought was very clever) involved baggies containing Scrabble tiles. Each bag of tiles spelled out a Corvette-related word or words and you had two minutes to figure it out. You could choose the baggie you wanted, and the point values earned by correctly spelling your word(s) varied by the length/difficulty of the word. We did well, getting "Bloomington" for our word.
The third game was a beanbag toss with rope hoops of varying size and distance from the toss-line. We got three beanbags and scored an embarrassing five points. Hope it'll be enough.
This event was a bottleneck as you can see from the cars below. Remember that cars left the starting line at one minute intervals:
Leaving this checkpoint, Gael spotted this lovely stream; Colorado is truly full of beauty:
The next leg of the Rally took us to the Copper Mountain Resort. The resort is one of the sponsors of VOTR and they had lots of fun things available to us there. For one thing, we had free lift tickets for one round trip up the mountain. There was another pair of tickets we could use for bungee jumping, paddle boats, bumper boats or gokart racing.
Since the bottleneck at the last checkoint there was a lot of bunching up here. The resort had provided a private parking deck for us but the two-person crew was a bit overwhelmed as a gang of us arrived at once:
I left Gael waiting to get into the parking lot (she's driving today, remember) and wandered about. I saw a sparkling Torch Red 53CE in the lot and went over for a closer look:
We took advantage of the free lift tickets:
The view from the ski lift was pretty spectacular, too.
In the center of the public area there was a "last hand on truck" contest going on. This is where you put your hand on a new vehicle for several days; the last person to remove their hand wins the truck. We didn't wait around to see who won:
The banquet hall was laid out with tables for twenty. I learned that there were 630 meals prepared for tonight. Our caravan trio was assigned to Table #5:
We learned that our friends Steve and Steve Jr. Pasteiner were dining downstairs as Spencer's Steaks and Spirits Restaurant so we hunted them down:
The Pasteiners own Advanced Automotive Technologies, the firm that builds the 1953 Commemorative Edition Corvette that Buzz, Jackie, Gael and I own (along with about 135 others!)
At the banquet, there was a large club from Texas represented and a large club from Arkansas. The Arkansans announced their presence with "Soooooooeeee, Pig! Soooooeeee!" so the Texans surrounded them and serenaded then with "The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You". Lotsa fun:
This kicked off similar demonstrations, all in good fun (I think):
We were at a 20-person table:
The entertainment was, I thought, a five-piece band playing 50s songs:
But then, a few songs into the set, the King appeared:
He's one of the best Elvis impersonators I've ever seen; he had the look and sound and had all of his stage moves down pat; moves I remember from seeing Elvis live in 1956. Very impressive. He did a few tunes and left to tremendous applause. The band played a few more tunes and he returned, this time as Buddy Holly:
After another cycle he returned as Roy Orbison. Off again and then later back again as Elvis to close the show:
