I Met Chip Foose!

Just to let my readers know, I MET CHIP FOOSE! Yeah, I'm a little excited. He is definitely the good guy you see on TV. I got a couple autographs and a picture with him and my kids. Something cool we saw was Chip giving a kid drawing lessons while we were in line to see him. God love my wife for spending 7 hours at the show and standing with me for 2 hours in the line to meet Chip.



Getting to the show was a bit of a challenge though. As we were getting closer to downtown, the traffic was backing up pretty good. Little did we know, since we aren't football fans, the Bengals had a game that day. That added about 30-45 minutes to our trip. Then we go around to the parking garages and just about every one of them were charging $20.00 to park. Totally ridiculous we think. Then we find one for $10.00 that wasn't clear on the other side of downtown, only about 3 blocks away. But as we were getting ready to get in the line to park, we realized we left the house without Ashley's purse, which had all of our cash in it. So now we're on the hunt for a US Bank ATM. We call the bank to find the closest one and by the time they can tell us where it is, we found it. So we finally get some cash to park and get to the garage, wait in line to find a spot and the garage is laid out so funky. You can't just drive around to find a spot. If you go down an isle and don't find anything, you have to back all the way out. So we did that twice before deciding to just go to the top and work our way down. Fortunately we found a spot within a couple minutes on the second floor. But the spots were small, even for our Chrysler T&C. So I had to do an Austin Powers maneuver to park. And lastly, the garage elevator was a little sketchy and looked like a homeless person was probably sleeping in it. And this was all just to park.

Then we finally get in the show about 3:45, Chip's first session is over at 4:00. So we figure we'd get in line and do that first. I think we asked 3 people how to get to where Chip Foose was, and we got 3 different answers and wrong directions. The first lady didn't know who he was, but sent us in the right direction, only saying we needed to get our hand stamped and go to the escalator. That's all fine and good, but we have a double stroller for the kids. So we ask another guy where the elevator was and he sends us to the front of the building where we came in. Little did we know, the elevator he sent us to got us nowhere near the 3rd floor where Chip was. But we took it to the 2nd floor hoping maybe the guy made a mistake. Nope, he didn't, there is a 3rd floor. One to ask person number 3. Finally we get the right directions. Go back into the show, go to the hall where the lady told us to go and go way past the escalator and the elevator is tucked away in a little hole in the wall and hard to find when there are hundreds of people around. We finally get on the elevator and to the 3rd floor at 4:03, and the line was closed. We guess God wanted us to be late for some reason. I did overhear there was a huge fight outside of the convention center about the time we would have been leaving, so maybe that was why. Thank you Lord.

The show itself was great, as I remembered from years ago when I last went. Hundreds of great cars to see and plenty of inspiration for my present and future projects. I tried to get a lot of pictures, but the batteries were going dead in my camera and I needed to save them for pictures with Chip Foose. I'll add them to my Photobucket account ASAP. Maybe in about 10 years we'll have our truck or some other car in the show.

So, until the next post, keep the rubber side down, and get to wrenchin'!

John