Ok, I've got some video that we shot on Friday posted. Go directly to it with this link:

Friday video

Or go to the June 20th entry and use the "Video" link.

Oh my god, I'm completely suffering from withdrawl. I even went down to the lame Durham VW dealership just so I could see some other bugs, and almost cried when I saw them all lined up in a row, looking so hopeful like puppies at a pound!

Sigh.

Home now.

Hello, cat.

I'm writing this from Stephanie's guest bedroom in Indianapolis.

Tomorrow I drive the 11+ hours to NC solo, so you won't hear much from me tomorrow.

Then I'll be home!

I told steph i pretty much plan to sleep all weekend.

Jeez. I keep meaning to mention this.

So at the car show on Saturday, Maria (who is 10) comes up to me and asks me some stuff about the web cams. And then she says...

"It's like Podvision."

I got such a kick out of that-- what a great term for it! PODVISION!

I asked her if she came up with that herself, and she said yeah. What a kid.

Maria Rocks. I'm going to have to use that term next year for the Spacepod Cam.

Pink, baby, PINK!!! Now that is what I am TALKING ABOUT!

So we saw Corvettes for about 100 miles straight. I mean, in little clumps, not 100 miles of Corvettes, but basically, a whole lotta Corvettes. As Jerry said, the Holy Grail of muscle car heaven.

Oh, and we're up in Indiana now and we saw one more lonely Corvette. He got left behind.

Oh, and Dan, looks like it is the 50th anniversary, not the 40th. Note photo in center column.

Ok, so yesterday we pass this trailer queen Corvette and take a picture.

Then today we start noticing quite a few Corvettes on the road... gosh, a lot of them... really, quite an excessive number...

And i say, there must be a Corvette factory around here, and steph says yeah, in Bowling Green (Kentucky).

And then we realize that what we're seeing coming south from Bowling Green is the biggest caravan of cars we've ever seen-- at least four times bigger than the biggest Beetle caravan we've been on-- all Corvettes.

So we're thinking, must have been a Corvette convention around here recently.

Today we're heading to my house. We are just past Nashville, TN, right now and should get into Indy at an earlier time than I'm used to after Roswell. :-) I'm looking forward to seeing my cat Lucy. I've only had her since January, and I've never been away from her this long. (Thanks to my catsitter Amy!)

Spacepod is running well, but he suffered a rock chip in the windshield earlier this morning. We passed an interesting maroon car that I photographed. It may have been a Lamborghini. The front was pointed and slanted down. It was driving with a Corvette.

Last night we tried to stop on the east side of Memphis, but a basketball tournament had all the rooms filled. The extremely helpful guy at the front desk of the Fairfield (we were hoping for a place with a pool and a hot tub) informed us that there were hotels 20 minutes down I-40. Not so. 45 minutes later, we found a Holiday Inn Express with a pool but no hot tub. Sigh. They did have free snacks -- Little Debbies, cupcakes, and such. We liked that a lot!

And now we're stopping for lunch.

Well, I was gonna go dig up links on newbeetle.org with photos from Roswell, but on the offical photos thread in the Roswell forum, half the pics are from Allpods! hehe, ah well, it's nice to be appreciated :) Here's the link anyway, and it's also over in the links section on the left side of the page:

Photos thread in Roswell forum on newbeetle.org

I'll keep digging for more-- I know Steve C. who drove down with us has something up there too.

Here's Steve's thread, which is a travelogue of his whole trip.

If you're a newbeetle.org reader and know of other photos threads that I can post, please add a comment or mail me!

Oh and a big shout out to the DFW VW folks who were on the web cam all day Saturday, glad you guys had fun finding yourselves on the cam! The goofball cam pics will definitely wind up in the "favorite photos" column.

heh. i haven't been able to have caffiene this whole trip due to some medication i was on... but the meds are finished and at the first rest stop out of austin (which was also our all time least favorite bathroom of the trip, ick) supplied me with a nice cold diet coke.

i proceeded to, as jack kerouac said, ball that jack up to Dallas listening to modern lovers and talking heads while steph dozed in the passenger seat. Then I crashed (NOT the car) and she took over :)

Saturday photos are up, but not yet captioned:
Saturday Photos

or go down to the saturday entry and click the photos link.

even val and steph are boggled by the many photo logs available on the site, so i'm going to have to improve my navigation and make things clearer.

we had a fantastic time hanging out with Val! She was kind enough to let us crash at her place, show us all around Austin, and even make us dinner.

Yesterday we slept in, then saw "The Italian Job" (featuring three minis, which were quite enjoyable to watch) at a theater which also serves lunch during the movie. Then we headed out to see Val's folks, Leon and Mary Prause, who own a yellow '98 Beetle named Jitter. Attendees at previous Roswell events should know Jitter by the black musical notes along his sides (which have now been removed). I snapped a pic of Jitter's Roswell trophies.

After a little down time at home, we went on a boat cruise in the lake, at the end of which we got to see a colony of bats fly out from under a bridge, which was pretty amazing.

Val took us to an old Austin landmark, Hut's Hamburgers, for dinner. The onion rings were enormous! And our waiter said, "gnarly" when he saw my camera phone.

(Ok Sarah, don't read this part...) After dinner we went for ice cream, only the second time i've had real ice cream in about six months. Drooooollllll..... it was so good :) I had "Belgian Mint".

Today we plan to drive for at least 10 hours and get past Little Rock. We'll be cutting through Kentucky to get to Indiana, and I think this may be my first time going to Kentucky.

Here we are in the Texarkana Gazette:

Beetle brigade beds down in border city

Thanks to Peter Schmidt who found the link and posted it to the list!

Photos from Friday are up. You can either scroll down to the entry for June 20th and click the photos link, or go directly via this link:

Friday Photos

Saturday photos will follow later... let's hear it for Val's fast DSL connection!

We're here in Austin visiting Valerie Stephens, who couldn't make it to Roswell this year. Her neighbors are kind (or foolish) enough to have an unsecured wireless internet connection so I'm happily surfing wirelessly from Val's sofa.

We're spending tomorrow in Austin, then head up toward Indy on Wednesday.

This morning in Carlsbad, I woke up and looked out the window to see Spacepod, and there was everyone, packing up to go... Terri and Jacob, Theresa and her son.. then John came out and got in Cleo, and BJ came running up with something in a bottle, and Ollie of course trailing along after her. I thought I should throw on my clothes and run down and say goodbye, but somehow I couldn't tear myself away from the window. And I felt very sad, because Roswell was all over and everyone was leaving.

This whole trip Steph and I have been talking about "the people we love"... and how so many of them weren't here this year.

So yeah, you people have to get your butts to Roswell next year, dammit!

Well, we'll write about Saturday night in full later, but suffice to say we had fun, we hung out with the people we love who we only get to see once a year, and I have these cool plaques now.

Later today we're headed out to Carlsbad... the rally has been cancelled so we may join the cruise out to a waterfall (gotta see this-- a waterfall in a state that's mostly desert!) and of course, we'll definitely be headed to the drive-in afterward!!

I'm pretty damn psyched about the drive-in :) Anyone who knows me knows that i am drive-in obsessed, so combining a massive number of bugs and a drive-in is like, totally a dream of mine .

like, totally.

anyway, i guess it's time we try to get everything packed again and find some breakfast and stuff...

(Award winners have been moved to the "Read More" section-- see link below.)

ok, saturday.

1. The car show

with the wireless network already set up in the conference center, and the car already washed, we didn't have to get up too godawful early this year-- 7am. I think we got to the car show around 8:20, a little later than we'd hoped, but with some finagling and me running about with a laptop trying to figure out where the wireless signal could reach in the parking lot, we got just the spot we wanted-- right in the middle of all the cars, not up at registration this year.

Setup involved only minor panicking and grimness on my part, and the guys at Mohawk Motorsports were very friendly and helpful when i was setting up my cam near them. Steph was so familiar with the setup by this point that she was able to do most of the setup at the car while I worked on the conference center.

This year I actually turned in my raffle tickets, bought extras, and tried to keep checking them periodically, though I did miss the last several calls. Oh well; I've kinda resigned myself to the fact that if i'm running around doing allpods stuff, I'm probably not going to be winning any raffles or car show trophies :) (not that spacepod is show car material these days-- egads.)

Let's see, the issue of attendance. A lot of people have been discussing this. I don't believe the number of cars was significantly below last year, though it was somewhat less. The vendor floor was definitely not crowded the way it has been in the past, and we hear that is due to last minute cancellations on the part of some vendors. Vendors that I am aware of were Mohawk Motorsports, Ronal wheels, Bugstuff (Pam and Kirk), a guy who was chipping 1.8T's-- I'm not sure which company, and as always Rich's VW toys over in the corner. I was really pleased to be able to get the Johnny Lightning models of the Isotope NB and of Randy from TVA's beetle as my sporadic searches for them in stores had not turned up anything.

I was able to photograph almost every car in attendance-- there were a few that I skipped and a few where I doubled up and put two cars in one picture. I had to use two pictures to get the whole Ladybug setup this year-- I told Tina she was going to make me buy a wide angle lens cause I can't photograph her stuff with a normal one!

The web cam uploads went smoothly and I put out Allpods business cards this year, all of which were taken before the show was over. So hopefully lots of folks are visiting the site!

Stephanie had the great idea of walking around with the video camera and doing a sort of running conversation about all of the cars, so we did that at the last minute before the awards ceremony (and I'll be getting that video up soon, it needs some editing though!)

We scrambled to get set up to type out the awards that were won and discovered that the beloved tangerine iBook which has travelled with me to all four R2k's had died! We'd hardly been using it and somewhere along the line it just up and died. John again magically appeared at just the right moment, brought us another laptop so steph could type up the awards, and just generally was our unflappable hero yet again.

I snapped web cam shots of people being handed their awards, while stephanie typed, and after the awards steph started breaking down the cameras while John and I tried to get the awards file from his PC to my Mac so I could upload it to the site.

I've gotta take a moment from my own story to say how excited I was that my friends BJ, Ollie and Maria won second in their class! They have the black retro styled NB with the teardrop trailer, and they'd done an elaborate display of what they call "cheese"-- wonderful old picnic stuff from the 50's, some tiki stuff, a victrola, etc. BJ said it was her first trophy, and she was pretty damn excited. I've got a picture of her with the trophy somewhere which I need to get uploaded.

I usually rush around right after the awards are over to be sure the cams are all packed up before the parade starts, but I also usually wind up waiting in the very hot car for a good 20 minutes after the packing is done and before we leave the parking lot-- so even when I saw cars starting to leave the lot I figured I had time to work on getting that file transferred.

But before we could get it transferred, Steph came running in and said that we had to leave NOW. Cet and I grabbed the rest of our stuff and ran out to the parking lot-- ours were the only two cars left!! The parade had left us behind!

It was somehow just the saddest sight to see spacepod left behind by the parade in that parking lot, when the last time i'd seen him he was surrounded by other bugs.

2. The parade and my yearly meltdown arrives late

So yeah. By the time we got in the car and tried to catch up with the parade I was feeling pretty stressed and pretty sad and, as per usual, had my one break-down-and-cry moment of the trip. And here I thought I wasn't going to have one! We sort of trailed along after the police bug, which was obviously meant to be the last bug in the parade, me crying and steph trying to comfort me.

The parade didn't seem to last very long this year-- maybe we'd missed an entire loop or something.

Anyway, we retired to the hotel for a while, and then decided to go have dinner somewhere before the party.

3. We escape to Red Lobster. Yum.

I guess I don't have anything more to say than that. It was yummy :)

4. Arriving fashionably late to the Alien Ball

Back at the hotel steph proceeded to apply the "rainbow alien" costume, which involved a cloud of toxic fumes around her head (and rainbow striped hair). I didn't really have a costume; just the spacegrrl shoes and my silver deely- boppers.

Everyone was sitting down eating when we arrived (which was sort of how we'd planned it). We sat down with Shelley, Jacob, Virginia, Clem, Teresa, Star, and Josh. The world's loudest mariachi band was playing, making conversation nearly impossible. After a while, they stopped playing and David took the mic to make some announcements, including the Hall of Fame inductee.

Which, as it turned out, was me. I had no idea-- David said that no one had any idea, he hadn't told anyone. I remember when he held up the "reverse engineered from UFO's" framed poster I thought, "Man, I would LOVE to have one of those". Ha! Now I do! Anyway, I was very happy to get the recognition and I felt pretty honored to be put up alongside Debbie Duderstadt, who has been so generous to the show.

Attendance at the ball was really very low this year-- it's no longer the main event of the night, and things broke up after the award, there was no dancing. We headed out and got ready for the pool party.

5. The pool party is a bust

So we got to the Sally Port, found the pool-- no party. Tried to find another pool. Asked at the front desk-- and the guy said the pool party had been cancelled! "The DJ" (Russ) was spinning in the bar, but otherwise, no party. We headed for the bar and ran into Susan Hester, Tina, and Lisa Herr sitting outside the bar. We chatted with them for a while, then the whole BJ-Ollie-John-Shelley- Teresa-Star-Josh-Charles gang arrived and we decided to see what trouble we could go stir up. Well, except Ollie, who was tired and decided to go to bed.

6. But that's ok

So we drove around Roswell, out to the racetrack, but all of that was over, tried to find the bowling alley but it was closed, stopped at Sonic for a drink, drove out to Wal-Mart where John and Charles did some "geriatric drag racing" (a drag race conducted at speeds of 10mph or less), and finally wound up just hanging out in the parking lot of the Days Inn while John negotiated with Charles over a PIP rack that Charles was selling.

Which was actually one of the best parts of the day, for me, cause BJ and I got to sit around and gossip which we only get to do once a year, and is kinda hard when Ollie is never more than two feet from her! Not that I don't love Ollie, but, you know.

Ok, we should be uploading web cam pics by 9am Mountain Time if all goes well-- maybe a little earlier. We'll see.

We did take plenty of photos yesterday, and we'll take even more today, but we won't get them up til Sunday and Monday-- there's just no time!

I know some of you are having trouble accessing the video we posted the other day. I'll attempt to troubleshoot that on Sunday or Monday, but since i'm on a slow dialup connection that may be difficult. Maybe I'll hit the Roswell Starbucks and see how fast their wireless network is.

Ok, gotta get ready for the day!

the day started very nicely. the first people i ran into, when i was loading the car, were the nice folks from New Hampshire who insisted on giving me the cool alien in a spaceship finger puppet they had on their dash!

we had breakfast with Jen of Blue Smiley fame and Jen's Mom.

somewhere along the way from sweetwater today we picked up folks from amarillo and houston-- quite a few, actually, including a mellow yellow vert and a pink chromaflair. The Talleys were part of the group-- Karen and Cameron. We all had lunch at the Dairy Queen, then a "fast group" set out and we chose to stick with the "slow group". Finally tooled into Roswell around 4pm.

Headed up to the conf center to do some setup and ran into our old buddy russ who is now a vendor-- mohawk motorsports. he looks to be the biggest vendor there this year.

We made registration late and missed almost everyone except of course Howie, and Shelley Keys who we had missed very badly on the caravan-- she had to ride with Central this year.

We found Cet and got some crucial info from him, ran back up to the conference center to finish setup, and Cet magically appeared with his iBook, which in all the stress over leaving my wireless hub at home, I had forgotten I also needed to borrow. So he definitely showed up in the right place at the right time! Helped me get everything setup just right along with Steph and David.

I'll just mention again that Cet rocks.

David also came up with a much nicer way for me to setup the cam within the conference center. Whoo! So expect some nice shots, especially of the awards.

The folks from New Hapshire-- Michael, and we think Karen, told us they'd found a completely new hotel right across the street to stay at-- they were the very first customers! We decided to and switch there as the place we were staying was pretty far away. We're quite pleased with the change.

Unloaded the car and immediately headed out to the skywatch party where we ran into Teresa Hartz right away, and gave her the Cheerwine she'd requested from NC.

At the skywatch we also hung out with Susan Hester, Robb and Jeremy from Dallas, Terri of Smylz II fame, and of course Tina Ward of Tina Ward fame :)

Robb said that his brother, who works at Toyota as a power train engineer, is completely fascinated with the web cams, and has the whole engineering department out there distracted with them. So a big shout out to the guys at Toyota :)

We did spacepod proud with lots of good glow stuff and ran the web cam during the glow, though we were not able to run it live. Those pics are uploading now and will be available from the slideshow.

In the parking lot we tried to get closeups on the cams of folks before they de-glowed. Some REALLY nice shots there-- i'll eventually get em up in the favorite pics.

A beautiful Platinum with nice rims parked next to me; I got to talking with the driver and it turns out he's from South Carolina! He was totally amazed to find a North Carolinian there too.

Steve from Boston FINALLY gave us rides in his convertible with the top down, and all I can say is DROOOOLLLLL! If i ever buy spacepod a little sister, she WILL be a "top down car" (as my little brothers used to say).

We also met a fellow named Jacob from Oklahoma who had had his bug retrofitted with heated seats and leather-- very nice. He also had quite a beard, which he later read a poem about.

Finally we headed out to the car wash around 11pm, gave spacepod a fairly quick wash and vaccum, applied some of the decals i'd been meaning to apply, and headed back to the hotel just as cet, bj, and ollie pulled in.

Hey, it's only 1am-- and I'm about ready for bed. Here's hoping things go well with the cams tomorrow!

Ok, we're about 20 minutes out from Roswell and the spacepod cam is BACK ONLINE!

Mike, Matt says thanks for the antenna!!

ok, props are due.

- to cet, for leading the caravan smoothly onward, and especially for letting me use his wireless hub on saturday, since i managed to forget mine! (D'OH!!!) Cet rocks!!

- to ollie, for repairing the web cam which got yanked apart when we didn't give it enough slack before closing the sunroof. Ollie rocks!!

- to tom and mike, for prying apart those damn magnets with a pair of screwdrivers this morning. Tom and Mike rock!!!

- and of course to steph, for putting up with me when i am cranky :)

Arrived in Sweetwater this evening before dark... the media were already here and immediately began snapping pics and interviewing folks. ah, the paparazzi!

BE SURE to check the video link for YESTERDAY (the 19th)-- the Sweetwater TV news covered us, and some of the guys on the caravan captured it on video, and i've got it up on the site.

WEB CAM SCHEDULE FOR TOMORROW: ok, we expect to lose our signal somewhere not far out of Sweetwater. We'll capture images to our hard drive and upload them when we hit roswell-- they'll be immediately available from the slideshow.

We expect to GET our signal back just outside of Roswell-- and we're planning to start broadcasting the cam images as soon as we can as we approach. We're expected to arrive in Roswell around 1:30pm, though that could obviously vary according to a large number of factors.

We are also talking about running cams during the bug glow-- if it's easy and just works, we'll do it. Regardless, check the Instant Photo Log for candid shots we take around the party, we'll get them uploaded during the party or just after.

Phlog - spacegrrl

Lisa has posted some pictures at the above URL from lunch. We chatted with Michael Levine, whose wife is expecting a baby girl in two days, so he can't go to Roswell with us. Some other bugs and their people who can't go this year also came to have lunch with us.

Our connection and software haven't been stable enough to let us post a journal entry until now. We had a nice lunch in Dallas with the folks there and departed awitut half an hour ago. We added several bugs to the caravan, including a green
TDI from NH named Kiwee with a kayak on the roof, a Batik Blue hardtop, a Batik Blue convertible, an Aquarius Blue convertible, a Snap Orange (Mudbug, with Wayne and Ruby Alexander, who'll be with us to Abilene and are then going to catch up with the other Dallas caravan.

Onward to Sweetwater!

- condoms break. they're probably not meant to survive at 65+ mph for hours at a stretch.

- web cams stop working when they get wet.

- web cams dry out pretty fast and start working again!

Well, it doesn't make for interesting updates to the web site, but i'm happy to say that our trip so far is fairly uneventful. Very few slowdowns or road construction, but that'll be changing in Arkansas I am sure. Or possibly sooner.

Terry of Yellow Fever fame stopped by while we were having lunch and said hello for a while... he was pretty bummed not to be going with us.

We're heading out of Nashville now. This is who's with us:

Cet and Cleo
Lisa and Stephanie and Spacepod
The blue with the nitrous from CT
The father and son in the blue NB from CT
Steve in the silver convertible
Charles in Shift (the color-changer)
BJ, Ollie, and Maria in Rodney with the teardrop trailer

Seven bugs in all -- a nice little caravan!

As you may have noticed, we had a little issue with the roof cam. I was adjusting it and closed the roof on the cable, pulling the cam out of its holder and breaking a small plastic piece on the holder. I quickly got the backup cam on the roof, and it was adjusted perfectly already. (Yes, I had my head out the sunroof at 65 mph -- it was cool!)

We got a phone call from Terry of Yellow Fever last night. Unfortunately, he can't join us this year, as he has a new job that's taking up all of his time, but he's probably going to meet us for lunch today.

we're here!

we just talked to cet... they should be here around 9:30 or 10pm... we'll start looking for them around 9:15, with the cams live.

until then we're taking a break, see you later!

eeyore, to answer your question, we are only using one cam at a time, but we try to change the view periodically so it stays kinda interesting. Even though there ARE NO OTHER BEETLES WITH US, DAMMIT! argh.

Thanks for the comments! When we're able to connect, we can actually see them *from the car.* Did I mention how cool this is? Lisa is amazing and I bow to her vastly superior knowledge of all this stuff.

We are just past Knoxville, and we were running the cam on the hood pointing to the driver's side. (You can see the windshield wipers in different positions when it's raining!) The connection went down at 1:58 pm when we went into the mountains. The front cam (Willie), when pointing forwards, was getting a lot of interference from the rain. The back cam (Jack) is in need of a little focus.

We are alone right now, and the Eastern caravan called us a couple of hours ago. They are at least two hours behind, and since we were due to arrive in Nashville to stay the night at 8 pm and before dinner anyway, we decided to go on past the meeting point, as waiting 2 hours wouldn't be interesting or fun for you or us. We would like to see some other Beetles soon.

Watch the site this evening, as we'll try to post live coverage of the Eastern caravan arriving in Nashville. We are closer than we thought, so this may happen anytime from 8:45 to 10:15 pm or so Eastern time.

The Web cams are holding up in the rain pretty well even though the condoms keep breaking.

got the cams working, whew. go to the cam page and you'll see a live feed in real time!

the pics look all compressed... i'll check on that.

Well, naturally, since i mouthed off about how great the cams were gonna be this year-- my wonderfully simple system which had been simply working without fuss or bother is simply not working this morning, of all mornings.

there's a few shots in the Tuesday slideshow now if yer dying for some spacepod cam action-- including pics of a white nb we encountered by chance.

i'll keep working on it...

Ok, a pic of the cams, well protected by latex.....

*Just* got this working. I can upload candid pics from my camera-phone directly to "photo blog" web site... http://www.phlog.net/user/spacegrrl.

So check there often while we're gadding about in the evenings or while we're in roswell, and we'll try and get some interesting stuff up there during the days.

Here we are at Lisa's house, doing all that last-minute stuff before the trip. Today we took Spacepod to get his air conditioning fixed and to get some amazing new graphics. It was later than we expected when FedEx finally delivered the part to the dealer, but after some worry and re-planning the day, we were able to work around the delay. We're still working on last-minute Web cam preparations, and we've had lots of successful test runs.

Tonight we went out for Chinese food and had interesting fortunes.

Mine: Place special emphasis on old friendship.
Lisa's: To effect (sic) the quality of the day is no small achievement.

Question of the day: How do you protect a Web cam from the rain?

Answer: You try to make raincoats out of baggies until Lisa brainstorms a better and more elegant (!) solution -- you do it the same way you protect yourself from pregnancy and STDS. You use condoms! The Web cams are now safely protected from the rain and from impregnating any female Web cams they might encounter on the road.

Oh, yes, and we've named the Web cams. Stay tuned tomorrow for shots from Willie, One-Eyed Jack, and John Thomas, and remember, electrical tape solves every problem!

ok, it's 2am, why are we awake and chatting and checking email? well, because steph's flight was 2 hours late leaving chicago and we were hungry and etc.

but here she is, safe and sound!

Ok, I will admit, life has distracted me and I haven't been in that "gotta go be with Beetle people" mood that I'm usually in all spring.. until now, anyways.

Plans are starting to come together.. looks like Steph and I will be visiting our friend Val in Austin after we leave Carlsbad, since she can't make it to R2K this year. And I'm pretty excited about going to the rally (which I've not done in past years) and to the drive-in theater Sunday night.

Spacepod is looking really good! At long last, his windows are tinted, and not only does he look handsome, but I can already tell that the glare and heat are reduced as well. I wish I'd done this years ago.

I got him back from the detailer today-- the first time I've used a professional detailer. I have to admit that I was disappointed. I am sure there are really good detailers out there who will do a better job than I do on my car-- but I'm going to have to go back after these guys and clean up a few more things. I just didn't have time to sit there and wait while they did the job right. And my a/c was no longer blowing cold when I picked it up-- they must have dislodged a wire or something. Argh. That means a trip to the dealer to get that fixed. At least the folks at my dealership really love me and my car-- and can give me a loaner either tomorrow or friday.

Charles mounted two more web cams for me, and my friend Sarah has helped me prepare graphics files for a print shop that's going to make some graphics for the car. My friend and co-worker Dave, who has helped on Allpods projects of the past, is helping me get some scripts working that will allow me to post pics from my picture-phone directly to the web site. Hopefully we can get that working!

Everybody rocks. And Stephanie especially rocks because she's going to put up with all of my crap all the way out to Roswell and back :)

Well, everybody but those dumb detailers, anyway...

My co-worker charles came up with a very clever way to mount my new web cams on large, heavy-duty mag mounts such as are used for CB antennae. Check it out:

This is going to make for some amazing shots! We can position cams anywhere on the outside of the car, plus the pics this year are going to be LARGE and CLEAR. You will feel like *you're* mounted to the outside of the Spacepod!

This is not your grandma's web cam!!

THANK YOU CHARLES!!!

Lisa set us up with a blog to post journal entries. This is my first post -- I've never had a blog before.

I have my plane tickets to get to North Carolina. Now I just need to register for the show...

--Stephanie

It's high time I got the 2003 Allpods site underway! This year I'm planning new t-shirts and other goodies for sale. I'm also excited to have some new equipment which I think is going to really improve the web cam. The pictures will be larger and clearer, and the system will be simpler for us to run while we're on the road.

I also plan to position the Spacepod in the crowd this year during the car show-- so the car show cam will have a view of something other than Cueball and Spirit :)

As you can see from the sidebar, Steph is going to be my co-pilot this year. If we can just avoid any family or other crises-- I think it's going to be the best year ever for Allpods.