Ironman Karting

So I've just finished the race, to say it was tough was an understatement. 
It was a strange format due to there being 23 participants in that you had a 5 min qually session and the marshal would pick out the fastest person and everyone else just lined up behind them in their track position, so it was just a matter of luck as to where you were! Unfortunately I was about 12th... The car had chronic understeer during qually, the flat out bends on the straight (if that makes sense) were very hairy and couldn't be taken at full speed to start with. The brakes also pulled massively to the right which once I knew that wasn't a bad thing!


So the race started and it went well to start with, gained 5 spots on the first lap and a couple more on the next few laps. The car was still massively understeery and I was very worried about getting mugged on the straight. Ironically however, choosing to defend my line at the end of the straight was my undoing. As I went inside and therefore braked early, the guy behind hit me quite hard, pushed me offline and then it was a case of how hard I was going into the tyres. After the mashall dug me out I was in around 16th. He did get a 30sec penalty for doing it, but it didn't help me! Saying that, the heavy impact seemed to help with the understeer and it was a little better to drive after that.


So the next hour was spent plugging my way back up the order, the competition was pretty good, and there was quite a spread of the field, so I had about 10-12 laps of open road at one point. That's the hard part really, normally I like pounding out the laps, but towards the end of the first hour, dehydration was kicking in, and my shoulders were starting to ache. Once amongst traffic concentration kicked in and you didn't notice the pain so much. Overtaking wasn't too bad, and for some reason there wasn't a marshal on my favourite overtaking spot (for those that know the track, it's the left hander at the bottom of the ramp) so they couldn't spot any 'nudges' :)


There were two very fast guys out there who were streets ahead of the rest of us, mind you they had their own Sparco race suits and boots so they'd done it before!


There were a couple of red flag incidents which stopped the race, I'm not sure what for but it involved people swapping karts. On the second flag, I was sure it was near the end of the race, and I called a marshal over to get the time. 50 mins remaining! I'll be honest, if it wasn't for that 2nd prolonged red flag I'd probably have had to stop. I was getting cramp in my right leg, and my abs were hurting so much I thought I was going throw up in my helmet, plus I desperately needed a drink. 


Back underway I got past a few more people and was in a gap again, tough time that, the race leader lapped me, but I caught him and unlapped myself momentarily in the traffic. The car was getting oversteery now in the first half of the lap and I did have a spin at one point, but it was in a wide area so I got it spun around without the marshal and didn't lose a spot. 


The race finally ended and I crawled out of the car, I had no idea where I was placed and was pleased with 5th, my target being in the top half. Maybe without the big crash near the start 4th was possible but as that cured my understeer and made me come through the pack, I would probably have died long before.


Fastest lap was a 55.4 (lap 61) which I was also happy with, my previous best there was a 57.4. The winner did 53.8 so I obviously have some way to go!


So physically gruelling, good fun, but never again for that distance!!!

Day 15 - The Journey Home

'Someone' had the great idea of getting up at 5:30am on our last day so that we could hike up to Castle Rock for sunrise. Although this was pleasant, the easy stroll that was in our minds was soon wiped out as we had to climb up near vertical slopes to get to the flat peak. Once up it was pretty nice and I'm sure the pictures won't do it justice.

After a quick(er than expected) descent, we grabbed a quick breakfast and then started the put-off-as-soon-as-we-can chore of clearing out the car and packing our stuff for the journey home.


After a couple of bin liners of trash the car looked almost acceptable for a rental car, and packing our cases could have been done more eloquently with a shovel if we're honest.


Soon we were on our way for the final leg of the journey, and made it to the airport with just one wrong turn.


There were of course delays to our plane, there was some 'incorrect luggage' (read: bomb) in the hold which had to be removed, and then we hopped over to Chicago.


There were delays there too unfortunately, this time to replace a seatbelt. That sounds like a made-up excuse if ever I've heard one.

The flight back was nowhere near as good as the flight over with the atypical legroom provided making us wanting to saw our legs off at the knees after about 2 hours.


With our Vegas heads still on we played video poker on the plane and soon found a bug that allowed us to rack up the chips like there was no tomorrow, why don't Atari make the systems in the casinos too, dammit!


Once in London we somehow managed to find the car and Martin did the tough drive back to Birmingham, it was a short journey in comparison to some of the epics that we've done over the last few weeks but was one of the toughest due to sheer exhaustion and jetlag.


And that's it I'm afraid, the journey is over and back to work tomorrow (boo!).


Enjoy!


Mark & Martin
 
Achievement: Survived America

Day 14 - Last full day

We awoke to the joyful sound of Charlie, the dog harassing a sheep. If you've ever seen a dog harassing a sheep, it was nothing like that! Charlie is the new member of the Kyte household, a cute little puppy who has way too much energy first thing in the morning and the sheep was more man-made fibre than wool.

We set out on our travels in the Impreza STI with Pete at the wheel. 


Achievement: 120mph.

We went to a gold mine and was lowered 1000foot in what they called an elevator, but frankly it more closely resembled a sardine can! We were packed so tightly that if you didn't breath in unison with the person next to you, you could forget it. Once down there, the tour mainly consisted of demonstrations of the noisiest mining equipment you could find, short of dynamite itself (although sneakily they also had a recording of that). After paying us off with some gold ore we returned to the surface via the same physically disabling route and continued our travels.


We ate at a local town called Cripple Creek which may or may not have anything to do with the aforementioned elevator.


We then took some interesting roads, starting with Shelf Road which was a dirt track around a mountain edge. Luckily we were in the right car, which was essentially a Group N Rally car. Following several wall of death manoeuvres around the lips of the canyon we moved on to Phantom Canyon or Special Stage 2 as it became known.


Achievement: 3000 miles.


This stage was equally scenic and generally good fun to drive, some more oncoming traffic kept Pete awake, but his appetite wasn't quenched so we hit Gold Camp Road which was 22 miles of very bumpy, very narrow, suspension pounding, back breaking,  nerve wrangling dirt track.

Once back home we were roped into planting trees before heading to Red Robin for hopefully our last burgers of the holiday (please, no more!). All burgers scoring an average 7/10.

Day 13 - In the Drink

Four days in Vegas with no accidental loss of money. One night in Grand Junction and a late night journey to an ATM (drive through no less), and we are down one bank card.

After performing the necessary actions to cancel it (read three hundred phone calls to random locations around the world), we headed across to Glenwood Springs to participate in some white water rafting which had been recommended to us by a couple of people.

Achievement: 2500 miles.

Fortune shone on us as we arrived 15 mins before a pre-booked group were ready to head off and there were 2 spots free. We soon found ourselves on the river bank staring down at a river which suddenly looked to be flowing much faster than when viewed from the car.

Since booking the clouds had been forming menacingly above us and sure enough 30s after we started down the river the heavens did their best to sink us by pounding us with sharp hail. The experienced guide who had previously explained that he had only had to seek shelter once in fourteen years, promptly had to make it twice as he grounded the craft on the rocks and we took shelter. 

Ten minutes later, hail gone, blue sky back and the river now refilled, we resumed our adventure through the various rapids - Tombstone, Wall of Death, Pinball Alley to name but a few. It should not come as a surprise that this was a fairly wet adventure. The guide was superb, pushing the group to the limit and restricting the number of near overboards to just two.

It should be noted that during the hailstorm, there had been some spectacular lightning. We did spot a fire fighting helicopter taking a quick drink from the river. Tracking it we saw it dump its load on the hillside where a nice fire (caused by lightning) was doing its best to grow.

We also noted two vultures in the area who were looking on keenly. We had dissapointed them by surviving the rafting, and although the fire was still burning when we left, hopefully they remain disappointed.

With most of the day gone, we headed onward towards Denver, stopping briefly in Frisco (so we kind of made it) for food. It was an odd pub, nice food, but everyone was playing a game of handegg bingo so we left. Later on the road, Martin took over driving with near disasterous consequences (see pic!)

Day 12 - Technology Fail

Today we went driving, starting in Cedar city and heading towards Grand Junction, so about 4-5 hours on the road.


We saw some smoke in the distance which looked suspiciously like a controlled burn which we witnessed earlier in our travels. Curiously the signs seemed to indicate that they'd given this one the name 'wildfire' which made it sound rather exciting. So when the Interstate branched towards the fire, we thought it would be a good idea to use that route. 


After driving through thick smoke reminiscent of a Sherlock Holmes-esque fog mixed with an I celandic volcanic eruption, we were informed that the Interstate had been closed behind us due to an uncontrolled fast burning forest fire. We decided to waste no time and heeded the signs urging us not to stop under any circumstances. We did just that once we'd pulled over to swap drivers, get Martin's camera out of the boot so that he could take some nice pics.


Over the last 10 days or so we've been collecting pictures of number plates from different US states. Needless to say, this has got us some strange looks both in parking lots and when overtaking people, then slamming on the brakes, getting a camera out, photographing them, and then speeding off.

After driving on boring interstates for a few hours, Mark pulled off as he saw a dirt road that looked fun. For those of you familiar with Dodge Chargers will know that they're rear wheel drive, have soft suspension and deliver power about as predictable as a roulette wheel. Mark enjoyed this drive, Martin survived this drive, the laptop sadly managed neither. It now has a large crack across the screen making it very difficult to use and editing the next couple of movies that we're working on is proving nigh on impossible. But we will persevere with these updates as long as we can.


Further along the journey we stopped for some sightseeing at various places without getting lost for a change. During this journey we have found several signs which seemed oddly familiar...

Once in Grand Junction we thought we though we'd catch a movie at the cinema and have an early sleep. We purchased tickets for the 7:05 viewing of The Town. With an hour to kill we grabbed some food at Boston's where we chatted with Amber who was very helpful in sorting out tomorrow's activities, lets see if she gets us killed. After Amber's line dancing demonstration she tried to sell us some dessert which we clearly didn't have time for since it was already 6:45, however on Amber's watch somehow it was 7:45... After a brief discussion where Mark tried to convince Amber that her watch must clearly be wrong as having crossed several timezones today, there is no way that his iClown could be mistaken. Stupid phone. So with some now redundant tickets in our possession we decided that we did actually have time for dessert afterall. We still have a slight suspicions that this restaurant uses time travel as a means of making profit.


Back at the cinema we convinced the tellers that we were stupid English people (a hard sell I know), and we'd just flown in and our watches were still set to GMT. They seemed to accept this and let us in to watch the film which wasn't too bad, a bit like a cross between Heat and a shit Ben Afleck film.

Day 11 - Leaving Los Vegas

We woke up to realise that we'd had no sleep due to getting in at gone 5 and having to set the alarm for 9:30 so that we could checkout on time. After a quick job of throwing everything in the suitcases we regrettably left the hotel. We weren't done with Vegas yet though, while in Hooters the other day we noticed cheaper tables there, so we thought we'd pop over to lose our last bit of money.


After a quick burger (5.5/10) Mark played some roulette. He bet big on 32 red as it still hadn't come up all week. He eventually gave up on that and just put a single chip on it when of course it came in. Slightly annoying, but still won him money, so we left Vegas on a high with a massive $5 profit, high rollers or what!


We were soon on the road to a random place we picked on the map when we pulled over to get some gas. Luckily the place we pulled over at was Las Vegas Speedway, so Mark decided to try and get the car on to the track. For some reason, they don't allow that, so we found an unmanned karting track there instead and took the car on that while no one was looking :)

Achievement: 2000 miles driven.

Soon we were in Zion National Park, Mark was disappointed as it's a little different to Zion out of the Matrix. The Zion people wanted $25 to look at a mountain that we could already see, so we parked the car and walked there instead. Mark swung from a tree and Martin climbed a pile of soot. You can see that the tiredness was getting to us by now.


After another 2 hours driving we arrived in Cedar City, our destination for the night. We watched a little TV, taking in The Apprentice, 2 handegg games and I-Spy all at the same time without missing any of them due to the beauty of the frequency of advert breaks.


A quick bite to eat at Denny's and then we watched The Replacements on TV back in the room. It's fairly old and is THE most cheesy predictable cliched movie out there. Also in the ad breaks (which made the movie twice it's normal length), there was this annoying fat old woman who would interview some country & western singer about food she was cooking. American TV is strange!

Day 10 - Cars, Guns & Celebs

Martin in his karting mask

Another day in Vegas :)


Originally set out to hunt for breakfast, but had lunch instead, see how we roll now?


We were soon on our way to a Karting place, it was pretty decent, 45mph electric karts. The first run was just the two of us and we messed around rather than trying to set decent times. So on the second run we were up against 5 others who we wasted. I think the lack of an oval track confused them. The fastest time for the week was set by The Stig though which we cheered :)

Intent on making the most of our last last day in Vegas, we headed to the Gun Store, Mark took a Glock 21 .45 and Martin had a 9mm Baretta. Martin decided to shoot zombies as he had his anti-zombie t-shirt on. It's worth noting that the guys at the Gun Store have no sense of humour.

Achievement: Fired a gun.


One of our tips to pass on to future visitors of Vegas is when you pick which club you want to go to on the evening, go to the casino in the day and you often pick up some vouchers (sorry, I mean coupons). Having reviewed possible evening clubs, it seemed that Moon could be worth a punt, so we headed to The Palms in order to try and wrangle something. To cut a long story short , after a number of unlikely coincidences we found ourselves talking to Miss October - Playboy (who impressively Mark managed to snub) and also in possession of VIP "access all area" passes to all the venues on site.

Achievement: Spoke to a celeb.


We didn't have time for anything decent to eat, so we dashed to McDonalds for a quick burger (3/10) and then got ready for our last night in town.

The view from Ghost Bar

Soon we were back in The Palms to make the most of the passes. We started with the awesome (a term often overused, but in this case completely valid) exclusive lounge bar - Ghost Bar which is on the top floor of one of the towers. This offered stunning views of Vegas from the 55 story balcony.


A couple of hours later we decided to move on to the clubs which were located in the adjacent tower. When we got to the base of the tower we were disheartened to see the mile long queue to get in. However a quick flash of the VIP wristband and the bouncers opened up a new line for us which avoided all of the chaos, skipping the queue and putting us in our own elevator up to the Playboy Lounge.

Achievement: VIP treatment.


We didn't stay long in the Playboy Lounge, although very nice, it was full of high roller tables where the minimum bet was larger than the total amount that we'd brought out between us! So we headed upstairs to Moon, a penthouse club at the very top of the tower which has a retractable roof, light up dance floor, large terrace area, etc. Carlsberg don't do bars, but if they did...


When the party was slowing down around 4am we decided to walk back to the hotel which was a couple of miles. It was an eventful journey with a pimp-mobile pulling up to proposition us, and then, as we were crossing the freeway on the overpass, a car slid off the road and crashed into a rock causing sparks to fly everywhere. Instinct instantly kicked in and we immediately started recording and then dealt with the less important tasks such as making sure the guy was ok. Another car stopped and called 911 and we were pretty impressed by the sub 3 min response time for a cruiser to turn up, it also preceded the wrong way down the sliproad to access the site of the accident. 30s later another cruiser arrived on the scene.

Day 9 - Metro-Goldwyn Mayer

After last night's 5:30am finish we had a lie in until around 10 which is far too late for breakfast. Instead we took Spencer's advice and headed to Fatburger for some lunch.


The guy who runs Fatburger also doubles up as Mario on weekends it seems and Mark had no idea what he was saying apart from that the Princess was in trouble and something about Bowser. It's worth mentioning though, that if Spencer recommends a burger joint, you'd better listen to him (7.5/10). We had the medium sized burger which was a mere 8oz, the largest being the FBS which weighs in at 24oz!

Suitably fed and watered we headed to one of Vega's many malls. Mark continued on from his previous shopping trip and purchased more shoes bringing his total to 3 pairs. He may have to wear them as gloves to get them all back home.


We saw a vagrant roadrunner which must have had image rights as it wouldn't let us take his picture. However upon looking on Google at what a roadrunner looks like, the one we saw, may also have been in disguise. If it wasn't for the 10ton weight above it and a rocket powered coyote we'd have admitted that it wasn't a roadrunner at all and just some stupid pigeon.

All shopped out, we decided to go to our sponsored casino of the day, The MGM Grand. Once inside we marvelled at the immense gambling floor and the tacky animatronic themed restaurant. Whilst the 30 foot lions outside are impressive the real ones on the gambling floor took the biscuit.


While in the MGM we hit the roulette tables, Mark who always bets on the same numbers sat it out initially but after seeing his numbers come in 7 out of 11 times (which would have given him approx £100), decided to join in. Of course his numbers didn't come in again at all until the time after he run out of money when on the very next spin his number came up again. Martin however turned in a small profit so with the free drinks, he left a happy man despite the Morgan-Freeman-esque croupier giving him some strange looks.


For an evening meal we decided to have a wander off the strip and somehow managed to end up in Hooters, we'd come a long way from the Rat Pack of New York New York to the Rack Pack of Hooters. Mark had the chicken burger (4/10) while Martin tucked into a healthy portion of shrimp.

Achievement: Broke the Law (jaywalking)

Once satisfied we got changed and his the club Studio 54 back in the MGM. Martin made the error of ordering two Vodka Redbulls which cost a hefty £28 (£20!), needless to say, we didn't get that drunk. The club was pretty good, much better than the previous nights. We have noticed however, that to make it as a DJ these days, you just need an Apple Mac, download a load of pre-mixed mashups and press play in iTunes.

Walking down the strip at night can be interesting. For a very clean city it can be a little dirty with the constant propositions for drugs, sex, strip shows, etc. Our favourite was the free limo to the free strip show which costs $140, we're not sure where the 'free' comes in to that!

Mid-Vacation Quiz

Due to the lack of comments (come on people!), Martin is posing you the following quiz...
This photo was taken during the baseball game that we attended back in Denver, what is the object in the sky?
First correct guess wins a prize*

*Prize may be rubbish.

Day 8 - Vegas Baby!!!

Excuse me for the lack of effort in this post, I’d just finished typing it up and pressed the wrong button and deleted everything. I’m also hungover, tired and needing food, so here goes (again).

We took a long walk down the strip to find somewhere for our traditional stomach busting breakfast and ended up in a rock café using our newly found egg knowledge to order a large portion of calories. Luckily the strip is rather long, so the walk back to the hotel helped us work it off.

Back at the hotel we decided to have a go on the roller-coaster which was pretty good. We barrel-rolled and looped the loop at 20 stories high before a vertical drop helped turn our over-easy breakfast eggs into scrambled ones.

To avoid the extortionate Vegas food and drink prices, we thought we’d beat the system and head to Wallmart to stock up. We then successfully smuggled the booze into the casino using shoe boxes, it’s like the good ol’ prohibition days! The drink prices as previously mentioned in Vegas can be pretty high in the casinos, but we have found a new system to get free drinks. Find yourself a table to sit at, wait for the waitress, pretend to be playing and get some free drinks. Even if you do end up betting, you can play most hands for less than a round of drinks anyway, and if the waitress isn’t busy you can easily get a couple in before you’ve lost it all.

We moved up and down the strip trying to find a decent roulette table which didn’t have crazy minimum bets and some empty slots for us to play at, 3 casinos later and we were happily losing our life savings. All was looking lost when Martin made a heroic comeback and got a positive score. Hurrah!

I appreciate that this is
a picture of a fish and
there probably were
far better things to
take pics of in Coyote
Ugly but we were keeping
a low profile!

Early evening we went to the Coyote Ugly bar for happy hour drinks (that’s right, that was the ONLY reason we were there). Unfortunately there was a lot of audience participation to get free shots but we managed to avoid this being the shy English people we are. Luckily for us, some drunk americans turned up and we were off the hook and didn’t end up bump’n’grinding on the bar, sorry, I know it would have made for some good pictures!

Later that evening we went to Rok which is the ‘exclusive’ in house club in the hotel. It was a little underwhelming, but the music was good and it was fairly cheap to get in. It closed at 2am along with most other bars though, where is this 24 hour party scene that Vegas is famous for? We stumbled up and down the strip being moved on from bar to bar as they closed and ended up doing some late night gambling instead. Martin hit the high roller video poker machines and instantly won 25c which he tried to cash, but as the amount was so low the machines wouldn’t pay out so he embarrassingly had to visit the cashier for his winnings.

Achievement: ‘Debated’ with American’s about the war.

A long walk back to the hotel followed with our newly found entourage.

Day 7 - Chopper & Vegas

One of our better purchases was a polystyrene cooler that we keep filled with ice to keep the drinks & chocolate chilled. This is kept safely stowed behind the passenger seat in the car.
The downside is that apparently when performing a 'sharp' 180 degree turn at speed the cooler is prone to tip slightly or even completely fall over spilling pools of melted ice in the car. Go rental car!


This all happened whilst searching for breakfast which was delivered courtesy of IHOP. As much as we like to give the yanks stick, they do know how to cook a damn fine breakfast. Although in this case they got the order wrong, and later forgot the pancakes. How much of this was down to a brummy accent and how much is down to the Mexican waiter we cannot tell...


Despite our Grand Canyon intensive day yesterday, we felt that we had some unfinished business back in the hole in the ground. We felt an aerial assault on one of the seven wonders of the world was in order so we set in search of a chopper pilot to take us in. We settled on the aptly named Maverick Helicopters and with the Top Gun soundtrack blasting in our ears we set upon our flyby. Check out the montage and let us know what you think, bear in mind that we don't exactly have a video editing suite here.

Once the sortie was safely completed we got back in the car and charged towards Vegas. The drive was fairly monotonous apart from visiting the Dyson (sorry I mean Hoover) Dam. No idea how much sponsorship Hoover paid for that name. The dam was pretty impressive, there was lots of water, concrete and everything. It was also 102F so we didn't hang around and high-tailed it to Vegas!

Achievement: 1500 miles driven.

Our hotel has a roller-coaster!

Guess which hotel we're staying in! Hint: It has both a casino and our money. Actually we didn't do too bad on our pitiful betting on the first night. Mark nearly doubled on roulette and once you took off the drinks bill ($17 for 2 Buds), he nearly broke even. On Martin's round, he found a rather cheaper bar which was only $2 for two drinks, so he got 2 rounds in before it was Mark's turn to pay $10 for the following round. Mark's not too sure he got the best deal here :)


Following his winning streak, Mark had no idea how to cash the chips in, so he grabbed his chips and ran which apparently isn't how the casinos operate. After a lengthy discussion with the Pit Boss he was allowed to keep his winnings and asked to move along.

Achievement: Won in Vegas.


After a few bouts of Video Poker with mixed results (Martin lost, Mark won), we called it a night and walked back to the hotel to collapse and do it all again the next day.

Day 6 - The Grand Canyon

Today was all about the Grand Canyon, so after a good nights sleep in Cheap-Motels-R-Us, we went to IHOP for breakie. For those not in the know, IHOP rules, although having a small breakfast is impossible! Being English we had no idea how to order eggs so here's the definitive guide according to our waitress:


Sunny Side Up - They look like the pictures but are basically uncooked.
Over Easy - Flipped, but yolk is really runny.
Over Medium - Flipped, but yolk is not quite as runny.
Over Hard - Flipped, but yolk is not runny at all.
Scrambled - Messy. 
So there you go, you can now order eggs in America.

They say internet gaming makes the world smaller, but even so it was something of a surprise to not only find a friends car here in flagstaff, but also a series of signs to help us find them!


When back at the motel, we were just getting ready when Mark fell off the kerb and went over on his ankle and cut his leg. Of course this was over dramatised, but apparently he can keep the ankle and didn't bleed out.

Zoom in on Mark's right
leg to see the near
fatal cut that he endured.

Once at the Canyon we parked up and marvelled at the views before starting a hefty 8 mile walk along the rim in 30C heat at an altitude of approx 5000m. After about a mile we'd pretty much run out of water so we started a rationing scheme of not having any more until the end.Plenty of wildlife and views to catch along the way, including some Condors, Squirrels, Ravens and Americans. We then collapsed at the end and wilting on the bus back.

Achievement: Mistaken as Australians.

Back at the car we regained consciousness and jumped in the car to view the sunset and quickly got lost on the stupid road system around the Canyon. Instead of the sunset, we found lots of elk which generally seemed unconcerned by approaching traffic, although one solitary person walking happily along the footpath did somehow mange to cause a minor stampede.

The drive back was mostly memorable for the depressingly hard to photograph sunset (we found it eventually, shame we had lost the grand canyon). There was also an audience of deer standing at the edge of the forest cheering us on as we completed the rally leg coming in to flagstaff. Apparently a lack of water at altitude can cause minor hallucinations, but we saw no evidence of this.

Finally to carry on the obsession with food, we had dinner at an “Irish Pub”, which looked like any other sports bar except for the excessive use of green. The food was good though with Martin having a burger (7/10) while Mark had Sausage and Mash.