It’s been quite a while since my last blog. (Where does the time go?) In that one I had told you about several of the shoots we did for the season that is currently airing, but I never got around to the ones in South Dakota, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Florida and Georgia. Guess you’ll just have to watch the episodes but trust me, they’re all good.

The last few months have been spent busily turning the footage we shot last year into the finished episodes you’re watching on SPEED right now. I spend a fair amount of time in the edit suite viewing episodes in various stages of development, and it’s kind of cool to relive the particular event or feature. It’s also a little strange tho. When we’re in the field shooting, I’m focused on what’s going on at the time. I don’t really get to see what it all looks like going down on tape. When I watch it tho, it’s sort of like one of those out-of-body experiences you hear about. And just like with those, I’m able to observe myself but not able to chime in and give myself advice on how I might do it better. No matter, I probably wouldn’t listen to me anyway.

In addition to working to finish the episodes for the current season, I’ve been putting together the field production schedule for the shows I’ll be shooting this year. I’d say that’s about 80% complete. I have most of the events scheduled, and we’ll be shooting everywhere from Ocala, Florida to Fairbanks, Alaska. I was even looking at events in Trondheim, Norway and Ronneby Brunn, Sweden but both have fallen prey to schedule conflicts. I wouldn’t be surprised if we made it to one of those next year tho.

I will soon be on the road almost nonstop so I have also been frantically trying to finish a number of projects around the house and in the shop before my time for such things evaporates. This past weekend, I had two successful wrench projects. The first involved my ’98 Triumph Trophy motorcycle. This is a bike that I hadn’t gotten around to starting for two years (hey, I have six other bikes), and I certainly didn’t do all the right things when I put it up. In fact, I didn’t do any of the right things, and I knew I was just going to have to tear into it and at the very least clean it up a bit. I pulled the tank, drained the bad gas and flushed it, replaced deteriorating fuel lines, put in a new set of spark plugs, and drained and cleaned the carburetors.

None of this was particularly easy since the 1200 cc, four-cylinder engine is really packed into that bike and of course you have to remove a huge amount of Tupperware just to get to it. None the less, when I put it all back together, put some fresh gas in the tank and hit the starter, she sprang to life! I was actually somewhat surprised since this is a much more complicated engine than the old BMW boxer twins that I am more familiar with.

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We shot a couple episodes last week in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and it was really quite an experience. We flew in a day early to scope out the event we were going to shoot and get a feel for it before our camera man was to arrive the following day. Turns out, it was a good thing we did.

The event was the Gran Feria de Autos Antiguos; loosely translated, the Grand Festival of Old Cars. It’s held at an exhibition center in San Juan, and it’s the biggest car show in the Caribbean, boosting over 2,000 cars. When we got there tho, we found that the vast majority of these cars were under large tents; row after row of them. It was like a huge tent city.

The tents are there because the sun can really roast you in San Juan, and it could just as easily be pouring down rain at any time too. It was actually pretty nice for spectators, but it was clearly going to present some challenges for shooting.

There was definitely a festival atmosphere there. It was like somebody threw a huge party and a car show broke out. The place was packed and there was all sorts of stuff going on. There was even a roving band of musicians playing high-energy island music complete with multiple drums and horn section. These guys were really working up a sweat!

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