Pre-Fireball – Update

Today I flew out to Orlando, the starting point for this years Fireball Run event.

Hopefully during the race I will have a better luck then today.  I arrived at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport at 6:00 am for my 8:00 am flight on United. After waiting in line for fifteen minutes I finally got to the front of counter, only to be informed that the flight from Orlando never made it in to Phoenix last night, so my flight back was canceled.

Fifteen minutes later of checking computers, the ticket counter was able to route me into Charlotte with an US Airway’s flight with a connection into Orlando. One problem, the Charlotte flight was expecting to depart in 30 minutes and I still had to check in with them. I made a dash to the US Airway’s counter then to the security checkpoint. Here I was told that the computer had flagged me for “special considerations” because of the rerouted flight plan.

So during the next ten minutes I was patted down and my carry on was gone through with a fine tooth comb. With five minutes to spare I arrived at the boarding gate to find that this flight was delayed hour.

Finally I boarded the flight and arrived into Charlotte to find and the discovered that my Orlando flight was delayed an hour. Twelve hours from arriving at Phoenix, I finally touched down in Orlando.

My teammate “The Veil Guy” was already at the Fireball Rally kickoff party at Orlando’s Royals Royce dealer so I had to now catch a taxi. Off course with my luck my driver had little knowledge with the Orlando and of the English language.

So I pulled out my Garmin GPS, fired it up and directed the taxi to the event.

The kickoff party was awesome with many of the drivers showing off their cars.

The car I found most impressing was the “Bat Mobile” from the 1960 TV Batman series! The owner not only took great care in restoration of this famous TV car, but also took great pains in making sure that the car was mechanically sound for a 3000 mile plus road race across the USA.

Tomorrow morning we will make final adjustments and tune-ups and have a driver meeting in mid afternoon. Stay tuned as I blog across the USA on our cross country adventure as “Smokey and the Bandit, 2.0” and test various radar detectors and laser jammers!