Steve and Tara's Power Tour Adventures: HRPT 2018- Day 1: June 9- Bowling Green, KY (5.5 miles)

The first day of the Power Tour is always the easiest, just a simple cruise down the street to the venue. Today's venue was the Beech Bend Raceway/Amusement park. There's only one way in down a winding 2 lane country road. For a simple, in-town drive, it was actually one of the prettiest. Fortunately, we got to the venue right when it opened. It didn't take long for traffic to back up for miles. According to posts on the Power Tour Facebook page, people were stuck in traffic for over an hour.

This was a pretty place for a little traffic

Dragstrip and a Roller Coaster!!!

Once in the park, we made a bee line for the trees along the river and got a nice shady parking space.
We were quickly joined by Ron and Dustin a father and son in their 1969 4 speed Roadrunner. This was their first Power Tour. We spent some time talking and then headed to the vendor midway to get punched in and pick up our Long Hauler freebies. As usual, Mother's gave away bottles of their dry wash spray.

Shade is a wonderful thing on the Power Tour

These guys put sunshades in their T-Tops to stop the greenhouse effect

Edelbrock, Continental Tire and GM gave away hats. The GM performance tent had a 2019 Indy Pace Car ZR1 out front, in addition to some other high horsepower display pieces.

I really want one of these!!

One of the most unusual items was a vintage looking Prestone Anti-freeze can. They are kind of cool, but take up some serious space in the car. We'll see whether those make it home. Prestone also had their custom, supercharged AMC Javelin on display.

I think the color is called "Anti-Freeze

This supercharged hemi was nice and tidy under the AMC's custom hood

We ran into our Mopar friends Rick and Lisa from Tampa.

Lisa from Tampa with us in front of the Power Tour bus.

Of Course, we also got our Holley/MSD magnets, which after collecting one each day, make a full image. While we were there, they were swapping out a dual 4 barrel carb setup for their Sniper EFI fuel injection system.

It must be easy if they can swap it under a tent

I also bought today's shirt that'll be my t-shirt for tomorrow. Our seasoned Power Tour travel coordinator Lori pointed out that, if I buy each day's shirt and wear them the next day, I can avoid packing a week's worth of T-shirts. This, of course, leaves extra room for all of the stuff we'll collect along the way.

Once we got all of the "trick or treating" done, we went back to our cars. Along the way, we saw three classic muscle cars with serious modern firepower under the hoods. Check out this 1967 Nova with a 660 HP LT4:

It fits and is FAST.

This 1969 RoadRunner had a SRT 6.1 lurking under the hood:

Yeah, it's got a Hemi!

Once we regrouped and offloaded our swag, my dad and I decided to take the Corvette out on the dragstrip. I need to work on my starts, but with luggage and a passenger, ran 11.8 seconds a 118.6 mph. That was only .2 seconds slower than one of the Demons.

This was the best picture Tara could get--The white blur is us.

The real highlight of the dragstrip was Magnuson's monster supercharged Camaro. When it screamed down the track, everyone stopped what they were doing and took notice. It's easily a 9 second car, but ran 10s today. Another guy ran his Dodge 100 SUV(?) and it was fast.

Faster than it looks

Tara, Scott and I stuck around until late afternoon when the rain came. We had planned to drive around and look at the cars in some of the other areas of the showfield, but at that point, traffic leaving the venue was pretty backed up. When it became clear we weren't going anywhere for a while, we happened to be parked in front of the stage and the autocross course. Clarence and the guys on the stage were entertaining as always, but the real fun was watching the 4 brave souls, including one yellow Lexus IS250 who decided to use the wet autocross course for some impromptu drifting. They were on it to, except for the turn along the wall - they all eased off for that one.

Once we got out of the venue, we had a few minutes to freshen up before heading out to dinner downtown at Gerard's 1907 Tavern. We met up with Ted and Lori who have run with us on the last 3 Power Tours since we met them at one of the hotels years ago. Bowling Green certainly did not let us down when it came to food!

After dinner, we took the Acadian out for a cruise through all of the hotel parking lots. Sadly, the clouds opened back up and chased everyone inside. After a few drinks with friends we called it a night.