Will there be a caravan heading over to the winery? This will be the first time in 3 years that my wife will make it to one of these events- all it took was a little wine

 

Wine even is on Sunday, not Saturday!

 

ahh, yeah I know.. just asking if there will be a pre meet anywhere followed by a caravan over to the winery?

 

Tommy

where are we all meeting and pm sent.

Jag

 

Either meet at Ste. Michelle around 10 or Jody is leading a group out of RTC at 9:45 AM and you could caravan in with her. See you tomorrow!

 

Here's a few photos from the LFA event at RTC yesterday - /show/ . I wasn't able to stay too long but it was fun to drop by. Thanks to everyone who put this event together!

Here's one as a preview (It'd be nice if Flickr made it easier to share several photos on a forum).
http://www.flickr.com/photos/apexrally/5768312455/http://www.flickr.com/photos/apexrally/5768312455/ by http://www.flickr.com/people/apexrally/, on Flickr

 

you got me in the first photo and my car in the last. you could have at least blown the dust and stuff away from my badge for the picture

 

Here are a couple of pictures of the Ste. Michelle event

 

Good show, thx guys.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58kKYcf6UYQ

 

We received a couple of complaints from car owners on Saturday because they were not able to park on the main mall. My hope is that this explanation will be cut and pasted into other forums where Saturday's situation was an issue.

Our reason for parking on the main mall was to thank the merchants at RTC for all their generous support ever since we stared E@RTC. We picked three dates when we will be using the main mall. The first was this past Saturday, next will be July 2 for Ferrari Day, and last will be August 27 when we have our summer party.

We estimate, based on Saturday, that the center mall has around 80 parking spaces in total. We now get between 80-150 cars at RTC, depending on weather. We were going to dedicate those 80 spaces to those cars that are known to be the largest primary spectator draw, with secondary draw in our other lots. Because we never know what will come out, especially on a day where the weather was so questionable, we couldn't rule out what would and wouldn't make it into the second lot ahead of schedule. As it turned out we had a lot more exotic cars than enthusiast cars show up, and we gave them priority because again, the goal was about what would provide the most impact for the merchants.

E@RTC is first about exotics. That's our core focus and they will remain the priority. We are not ever going to be just a general "cars and coffee" because we don't think that's optimum draw for the Northwest. Exotics are the core draw and without them as an anchor we don't have spectators, no spectators means we won't get the really rare cars worth eight figures. Those same cars bring the spectators and so on.

Enthusiast cars are a very limited spectator draw, but we still do our best to pack them into our lots when we can. As parking is needed, we've taken on more and more lot space and we've never turned anyone away because of space. To further keep egos in check with a tiny minority, and to better manage flow, we constantly switch where we park cars to keep that from turning into an issue.

Two things went wrong on Saturday: One; we had no idea what we'd get because of the dubious weather forecast and because of the LFA. Two; we didn't have enough volunteers to keep the cars in the other lots grouped together. There were ten Thugs working their asses off as it was.

We also learned in the process that when the cars are in the center lot, there are no spectators in the other lots. Again, proving the point, however we do what we can to make everyone happy and will try and come up with a way to draw more people to the other lots on July 2 and August 27.

When we had the bare metal Bentley and Hispano-Suiza, that was obviously where the people were that day. People do not come to see what they recently saw in a Safeway lot no matter how nice the wheels look, however that doesn't mean that car doesn't matter either. We do have enthusiasts!

Some griped that we still had space that was unused, and yes, we still had a few spots left for truly exotic cars. The last thing we ever want to do is what happened in Irvine where the C&C lot was packed and a really rare very special seven figure car that went through a lot of trouble to get there couldn't get in and was waved to the spectator lot! So, we will ALWAYS leave some room to adjust cars, and there were a handful of cars that we were expecting that just didn't make it because it was raining where they were at the time.

In the end it was an unfortunate set of circumstances that made it impossible to make everyone happy. We only have so many volunteers to manage things and we were all working like crazy to manage what we had. We learn as we go and hopefully it will still be worth it to come out.

E@RTC continues to grow because of the selfless efforts of everyone involved to make it a great event. We do our very best to make it work, but we are all volunteering our time. We have fewer and fewer instances when someone shows up and makes demands on us with some sense of entitlement, but there will always be that one guy no matter what we do.

We have added more space to our main lots and hope to see you this coming Saturday!

 

I parked in the secondary lot and have no problem with it, people just need to get over the fact that some cars draw more attention to others plain and simple. It's funny how there was an SL65 Black Series in the visitor parking lot at Chateau St. Michelle, I'm sure the owner didn't make a fuzz about it even though that car is truly exotic.

 

We heard about that but he was a spectator and didn't want to show his car. He was there to see the others.

 

+++ on it being about the Exotics, I think parking with the Exotics is fun but I would never want my car to stop something more rare and interesting from being able to have a place. An older DB7 or Maserati Coupe is more exotic and rare than an M3 or E class, even if by now they sell for half as much. I love Ms and AMGs but I wouldn't get up early and drive an hour to see them, it's the Exotics that get me out and excited!

 

Here are some of my photos so far

 

^Wow! Great photos, gorgeous cars! Gorgeous day!