2013 vanning season

It's tough to keep on top of everything with so much social media available to pontificate on :). We're well into the 2013 vanning season and I'm way over the hump of the events that I'll be attending this summer.
Vanfest 18 was another great time. It was another record breaking year with well over 400 vans and trucks through the gates and close to 200 vehicles in the show on Saturday !.

 Drove to Vanfest with Eric a.k.a MUD BOS and Steve a.k.a Ghostrider and his wife Carol. I had hoped to do some video but it rained all the way there but fortunately that was pretty much it for the weekend.

 Then had a few weeks to get ready for the big show, the 41st National Truck-In. Being in Ohio and having about 380 pre regs I knew this was going to be a big one. 660 vans passed through the gates making it the largest Nationals in the past 10 years. The weather was absolutely terrible until I got there on Wednesday at 8:00 pm. As usual it was action packed with so much to pack-in in a matter of days. One of the highlights was doing road shots with some of my buddies from far away. Here's a shot of Jr and Glenda in Procrastownation all the way from Florida. This amazing van won the Best in Show title at the Nationals on 4 occasions. Was great to see the van back out, Jr and Glenda always makes an effort to support van events regardless of where they are.  

The early lineup is now a yearly tradition at the Nationals as well. For the past many years Wookee has been the main man coordinating this event, rounding up the vans from the 4 corners of the fairgrounds and placing them in order. Unfortunately Wookee was unable to attend the Nats this year due to injury. So we needed to rely on many more people to make it happen and it all came together for the largest gathering of earlies at 53!

There was a show n shine open to the public on Saturday, admission was canned goods for the local food bank. Here are some of hte Dodges in that show lead by Deacon Blues.

Jeff and Cindy Lou from Colorado surprised everyone rolling through the gates with this gorgeous 1939 Ford panel. It caught the eye of the judges in the show as well winning Best of Show and the Flying Eagle award for best van or panel first time shown at Nationals. The Legend of the Phoenix also from Colorado parked right behind the panel took some top awards as well.  

 There have been a number of vans customized on television reality shows. Most have been done quite nice mixing old school with new school touches that haven't always appealed to all vanners out there. These days old school is in and the Count and his cronies ran old school on this gorgeous Dodge on the most recent episode of Counting Cars on the History Channel that ran last night.  

One week from now Kurk and many of his vanners friends will be at Carlisle for the All Truck Nationals. This is the second year doing this, I was fortunate to attend last year's. Kurk has done some great stuff to get vanning back into the spotlight by getting vanners to participate in the Carlisle show as wel as in the Motorama indoor shows in the winter. Look forward to seeing the pictures from there that my partner in crime Superbeast will be taking.