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Day 4 Aspen to Denver (the Finish Line)

The final Elvis costume was on tap and that’s the “Hellvis” outfit. Red jumpsuit with red devil horns.

After coming back from the driver’s briefing I woke Kern up. Let’s just say after one look at Frank I knew I would definitely be driving that morning shift.

Now instead of a real simple highway drive – today’s route was one of the most scenic we’ve had. We left out of Aspen to climb to 12,000 feet to one of the mountain passes. We were instructed to wait 5 minutes at the top of the pass because there was a helicopter that was filming us.

Cool!

We had the top down and at 12,000 feet and one filmsy “Hellvis” outfit it was damn cold! Brrrr…. Our little Lotus was perfect for taking the curvy mountain passes at speed. It was awesome! This time we finally ran with a pack the entire day. After coming down from 12,000 feet we stopped a little podunk town to get gas and regroup. Once again it so funny to see people’s expressions at all these super cars.

Once we hit a smallish highway some of the cars really took off. In fact, we found out later that about 5 people on the road had called some “aggressive driving hotline” and reported all of us. So the cops were actually hunting for us. Now some of the guys were completely nuts and need to have their heads examined. One guy I saw passed on a double yellow and on a blind curve! Stupid! I am proud to say Kern and I got ZERO tickets.

After lunch we left a little resort of Winter Park or Winter Sport and some guy in a white SUV was honking at us. I thought he just wanted to say ‘hi’ and we sped off after our pack. Finally 15-20 minutes later he caught up with at the entrance to once of the CO Nat’l parks. He said he was one of our customers and had been reading the blog and knew we were passing through his town. How cool is that? We actually got a quick video of him saying how he actually believes us that all of this is for real now. I appreciate that thought but not sure about the logic…

To me, seeing 2 guys in Elvis outfits in a bright green sportscar wouldn’t make me think they really were making money online – I’d probably just think they were nuts

We all convened at an airport 15 miles outside Denver and I thought we were going to take a copter ride or something like that – but that didn’t happen. Instead they had a final police escort to take us into Denver. They actually shut down parts of the highway for us and then shut down one of the main streets in the heart of Denver for our arrival. It was awesome! I felt like we were part of some victory parade. There were checkered flags and girls handed us bottles of champagne once we got there. Of course, it wasn’t long before I took upon myself to shake up my bottle of Moet and spray it on people. That might have made some good video but Mr. Kern forgot to charge our camera/video recorder the previous night. So it actually died right at the start of the police escort.

That night we had a black tie awards ceremony and dinner. There were 3 awards – Best Car, Best Hand (poker hand) and Best Spirit. We won Best Spirit for our Elvis outfits. We got a huge (probably 15-20 lb) Pewter plate. Not sure what I’m going to do with it but it’s on my bar downstairs in my office. I stuck in my luggage to take home and I bet when it was Xrayed it came up pretty odd. I had a note in my luggage that my bag was opened by TSA.

After the awards dinner, Kern and I left our tuxes on and headed for a private party they had for the Player’s Run participants at some local Denver club. It was pretty cool and a lot of fun.

I left on a 1pm flight the next day back home to the wife and kid. I needed 2 days of solid sleep to recover. But would I do it again? Hell yeah! Who knows maybe I can convince some of my other Internet buds to come along next year.