A Run to E@RTC Part 1
I couldn’t miss our opening day of Exotics at Redmond Town Center, better known as “"E@RCT” no matter what. This is an event I love, and where I’ve poured countless hours over the past thirteen years.
I’ve also been talking about the Sprinter with friends and I promised to bring it to E@RTC, even though it wouldn’t be in the event. It would have been much easier to fly, but I wanted the adventure.
A friend, Vic Tiscareno and I co-founded E@RTC in 2009 and it’s grown to become the largest weekly gathering of exotic and rare cars in the US. We are now the ultimate weekly show, and I still manage all of the back end, as I have since we began. For me, it’s a year-around role and so opening day has a special meaning.
There are remarkable cars in other parts of the US, but not the caliber of collectables found in the Seattle area. We’re it. We have some of the very best in the world and we have the best team to bring on the show.
Most don’t know I now live in a small town outside of Springfield, Missouri in the most ideal home imaginable for me, called “Moose Lodge.” I don’t like to leave this place as it is a lodge lifestyle and I’m a bit of a work machine here. I’m therefore not giving up my role in E@RTC and I’ll fly to Seattle in the future. Enough about that.
Chelsea, my assistant, and I had been prepping for this trip for months, including getting the 2021 Airstream Interstate 24GT Sprinter Van serviced and ready, along with warranty work for the long drive. There were lots of little things and getting the Sprinter serviced meant day trips to Bentonville, AR, which is the closest Mercedes Sprinter dealer to where I now live.
I also have this belief that my other work shouldn’t be interrupted because of the constantly moving demands of E@RTC and an uncertain opening day. In other words, I’d drive while still holding my meetings and working as usual. It wasn’t like this would be a planned vacation. If we left, and I had a Zoom meeting, I was still taking the meeting.
The target E@RTC opening date was April 2, however rain delays pushed our opening until April 23. On Monday April 18, it looked like we were almost certain to have a nice opening day, and that was the moment it was time to get the Sprinter loaded up for the long road trip. I make our weather calls and the general rule is that if the chance of rain is 30% or higher, we’re off. Below that we’re on. There are some times when we have to average forecasts or eyeball it.
I was already somewhat packed, but with work demands, I had to get ready a little at a time, while maintaining a long printed list of what I needed to be done before we left. It’s making sure we had the little things that make the difference.
Because of bad weather in our area that week, and the potential for hail damage, Chelsea had to get the Sprinter from the storage garage, bring it to the house, load it up, then return it to storage until Wednesday morning so we could do our final load and hit the road. All of this was stuffed around my busy work day.
Wednesday morning, Chelsea picked up the Sprinter while I had my morning Zoom calls. She loaded up the last of our things while I was on my call and soon we were ready to go. Long road trips are a combination of excitement and anxiety. You’re excited to hit the road, but you still worry about the house or if there is going to be some weird mechanical problem or unforeseen bad weather. And of course, what other drivers are doing that moment. Accidents are a risk, but small.
Because I wasn’t going to alter my work schedule and planned calls, I was weaving everything around my typical daily schedule. We had a total of 66 hours remaining before our opening day, with 33 that would be spent driving, so it was an exact 50/50 ratio of driving and not driving time. This also gave us adequate buffers for possible problems.
We hit the road about 12:30 PM on Wednesday for the 2,015 mile trip to Redmond Town Center. It was a cold, dark and windy rainy day when we departed. It was one of those mornings that was miserable and felt like November in Seattle. I started the drive for the first two hours before Chelsea took over.
The goal was to get to Wall Drug in time for breakfast the next morning. This is the beauty of traveling in the Sprinter. It contains everything and so travel isn’t hard notched around hotel check-in, check-out schedules. You can drive or park, but no matter what hotels can be on your schedule if they happen to line up.
We made one last fuel stop just outside Springfield before we started north. I still had a half day of work to complete, so I sat in back working while Chelsea drove. The PepWave Max Transit Duo modem, aggregating AT&T and Verizon cell service did a fantastic job and kept me on Zoom calls for a chunk of the afternoon without interruption.
Our plan was to head to Kansas City almost straight north, on to Sioux Falls, SD, then west from there. The weather in route was reported decent past Kansas City, except for cold wind.
We were following 29 North and had to detour because a bridge was out on 29. We were routed through the abandoned town of Corning, Missouri, population 3, and it was like a scene in Fried Green Tomatoes. It was house after house that was collapsing down to nothing. I couldn’t imagine what happened in that small town to cause the place to just collapse like that. Here are a few Google Street View shots. It was “laid out” in 1868 with its post office that year, until 1964 when it closed.
Google Maps Street View image- Corning, MO
The whole town looked like this.
As we drove through Omaha, we were able to see an old Air Force One 747 lumber around at low altitude on a training flight, just as the sky turned dark. The thing looked like it was about to fall out of the sky, yet it kept flying like it had nothing better to do.
We made a short stop for dinner and a chance to get out of the Sprinter for a while. My dog needed the break. I’d been up since very early that morning and I was already tired. On all long roadtrips, there is that moment a few hours out when you finally settle in. Sunset was about that time.
Sunset near Omaha
I wanted to see friends in Vermillion, but we were passing through very late and I didn’t think it would be cool to stop by at that hour. It was well after midnight by the time we got to Sioux Falls, SD for the left turn onto I90 for the trip straight west. The plan was to just keep driving until we got to Wall, SD.
There is a trick to driving at night where there are deer, and that is to stay about five second behind a semi and just hang there. You’re far enough away to not annoy the truck driver and the chances of a deer running through that five second gap is very low. We set the dynamic cruise with the widest gap, which is about five seconds, and just followed the truck. It’s the safest way to run at night. Semi break lights will often tell what’s going on as it plows the deer.
We arrived at Wall Drug in the early morning hours, but there are parking limitations between 2-5 AM so we had to find a spot by a gas station until 5 AM, then move to the main lot. I took the reclining front passenger seat as a bunk while Chelsea took the back giving her time for real sleep. Besides, I had work to do in preparation for my meetings, so it was a night of little sleep.
I’m President of the custom software side of Infrrd, an AI software company out of Silicon Valley with most of the engineering team in India. I love what I do, but it’s a complicated work schedule.
I had to conduct a company town hall in India at 7 AM, via Zoom, and the call was nearly flawless thanks to the PepWave. I kept thinking about what a remarkable time we live in, where I can have a high-quality video call with a very large team in India, all from the tiny nowhere town of Wall, South Dakota! All from the inside of a Sprinter van with no wires to anything.
I wasn’t finished with my Zoom calls until 9 AM, and we made it in for Chelsea to experience Wall Drug in person. I could write all day about the phenomena of Wall Drug. It’s the best marketing lesson there is.
After the usual Wall Drug marginal breakfast, we were back on the road again by 10 AM. I was in back working, still answering email, and making calls while Chelsea drove. We tag-teamed in two hour shifts giving me time to remain ahead of work while taking an occasionally nap.
We hit very high winds in route, something we were expecting in that part of the US, but the Sprinter did just fine. We had to make a stop for additional water and a pump out in Wyoming after shower use. That turned out to be an ordeal because water was still turned off for winter at rest stops almost everywhere we stopped, including RV parks. This put us behind schedule.
Evidence of high winds over the grasslands.
Driving across from Rapid City, SD, to Billings, MT is a very long beautiful stretch of open grasslands with few people. Because of high gas prices, we rarely saw vacationers outside of Wall, so there were long stretches of open freeway with very few cars.
We were running late on our second day because of the attempts to find water, something we finally found at a KOA campground. We also made a stop to top off the propane because of such low night time temps and lack of shore power in route and not knowing what we’d need. We were using the generator at times to keep the batteries fully charged, so consumption levels were still unknown, when normally we had enough propane to last us a week.
Chelsea took a hotel room in Missoula, MT while I slept in the Sprinter. This gave me time to get some writing done and some badly needed sleep. I prefer the Sprinter over hotel rooms anyway.
The last stretch to Redmond was easy, but there was a lot to do before our event. I had lots of email to answer before the event.
We made a stop at Little Bit Therapeutic Riding Center where my two assistants got to finally meet. Kim has been a volunteer there for many years. By the time we arrived, the van looked like crap from driving in hard rain, dust, bugs, and general grime, so we took a big chunk of Friday afternoon to clean up the van and get straightened up for opening day.
I drove us to my old neighborhood and past my old house to show Chelsea the contrast between my old and new life. We parked on the old route where I walked Tide every day. He stepped out of the van, recognized where he was, and immediately started to take Chelsea on a walk through our old neighborhood, making turns just as we did on our hundred or more walks. He was very happy to see his old neighborhood.
That night, it was a stop at Burgermaster before we hit our hotel for the night. It was fun to hit a favorite!
I decided I wanted out of the van for the night so I could get a better nights sleep. I had a lot of work to do that required quiet concentration. Friday before E@RTC opening day is often preceded with more than 100 emails and so this was not unusual to wade through that many. We get an ever increasing number of sales calls.
Most can be answered in one sentence, and 90% of the answers are easily found on our website. I sat up until the early morning hours just answering email. It would make for another night of little sleep.
We were up and out the door early and at Redmond Town Center at 6 AM for the usual setup work and series of meetings before the day began. There is always that concern on opening day that turnout won’t be great. It was.
See Part 2!