Hello from Seligman, AZ

Tuesday early morning; March 11, 2008 (Sixth travelogue of this trip)

We are currently located here. The satellite imagery is not good for this location, so you may have to zoom out a couple of times

We enjoy Seligman. It is a very small town that was once a pretty popular stop along the famous Route 66 (often referred to as “The Mother Road”). The highway (mostly gone now, replaced by the interstate system) went from Chicago to LA and was immortalized in a song and a TV show in the ‘50s/60’s. There are a lot of websites the document the highway. One of the better ones is: http://www.historic66.com/. There is a crazy little walk up diner that has great malts. It is pretty much as it must have been many years ago. The town has lots of displays dedicated to Route 66 history.

Now that we are writing a blog, and it is more public, I have a few drag racing fans that probably would like a little information about the races we went to, so I will include a bit of detail

The races at Bakersfield (“The March Meet”) were great. It was a huge event with over 25 cars in each of the tow major classes (Top Fuel and Fuel Funny Car). There were over 500 cars at the event. I would say that it was as big as an NHRA national event. This event was a part of NHRA’s Heritage Series: http://www.nhrahotrodheritage.com/. The series was established to bring back drag racing as it was in the ‘60s. The rules for the nitro fuel classes closely define the engine modifications and car specifications to assure the cars are very much like the race cars out of the ‘60s, with the exception of safety updates. The Top Fuel best time was: 5.568 at 263 mph (which was a record) while the Fuel Funny car best time was: 5.836 at 243.63 mph.

The event also had a huge swap meet and car show along with a ton of vendors.

As I mentioned in a previous post, it was always my dream to attend The March Meet in Bakersfield. It was THE drag racing event at the time. It went downhill over the years, but has come full cycle and is now the premiere event of the series. This was the 50^th anniversary of the event and there were a large number of famous racers from both the past and present attending the event. Shown below are a couple of pictures.

A couple of Top Fuel Cars

A couple or Fuel Funny Cars

The car in the far lane is owned and tuned by some friends and won the event!

The track is located in the middle of a highly agricultural area. There are orchards and vineyards surrounding the track. When we pulled in we noted a distinct odor. It turns out that there is a huge compost center (several acres) behind where we parked. You can see it from the satellite photo in the previous post. I kind of got used to the smell (not sure Pat did). Saturday night the RV parking area (perhaps 200-300 RVs) was one big party! Someone close to us played very loud music well into the night. However, we slept well anyway.

The downer for the event was a tragic accident where a well know racer was killed (http://www.nhra.com/content/news.asp?articleid=27272&zoneid=8). I was at half track watching the race. I could hear the engine continue to run well beyond the finish line and knew that it was going to be terrible. They think that he developed a medical problem during the run and did not shut off the engine or pull the chutes.

Yesterday we started heading home. We drove a bit over 400 miles. Today we hope to make it to a casino north of Albuquerque where we can dump and fill up with water and Pat can contribute to the economy {grin}.

That’s all for now.