I couldn’t really tell what a beautiful place Xuzhou was the night before due to the rain and darkness,but I woke up the next morning pleasantly suprised. This was the first night of the whole trip where I was able to get a solid eight hours of sleep. I actually slept in a bit and found myself rushing out to the car to make the eight o’ clock start.

Here’s that pool I was talking about in the prior post. Looks amazing.. Too bad I’m scared of the water.

I actually was shooting our exit out of the city with the video camera so I forgot to take pics. We are going to try and make a mini video from our trip. I just hope the footage is good enough so you guys can see everything in better detail, and so you could also see everything I forgot to take photos of.

Aly reliving his youth barefoot style.

So here’s another example of excellent Engrish. I found this little sign in the breakfast buffet. I loved it so much I stole it and brought it back home.

The one thing that makes traveling on the Chinese highways awesome is the crazy amount of gas stations. Way better than the U.S. I can go for miles and miles here and never find a gas station, but in China, they’re there when you need them.. Each of them always comes complete with a market and large public rest room (Ass smell included.) The markets can be really random at times. Take this one for example, it had your average assortment of food and beverages, but it also had nick knacks. I saw a miniature plane made out bullets and glass case full of knives and assorted weaponry.

Here was my purchase from said market. An old timey replica musket that also had a butane lighter built inside. Aly bought some kung fu stick thing. This was one of my many random purchases made though out the trip. How am I going to sneak this thing on to the plane?

These dudes loved the free shit..

Mike (Frank 151) looks like he’s up to something…. and I want in on it..

Doing work son

The lunch time stop was crazy. This was the absolute one spot I wasn’t eating at for sure. It was buffet style with all kinds of random stuff… I saw a basket of sautéed chicken heads..  Yeah?…. No.

Look at this perfect roadway. The highways in China were all smooth, way better than the pot hole infested ones we have in the States.

Iron Mike got tired of holding the camera so he rigged up this thing using the busted Garmin suction cup. We like to improvise.

Due the fact that we had the tiny gas tank we got lost from the group again and this time we didn’t have the Chinese dude with navigation.

Some of the road signs are confusing so we went right when we should have went left, which forced us through another toll booth. The problem was that we needed to go back the way we came and the way back was being held up in a effort to keep the expressways clear and Beijing smog free. That meant that each of the tolls were regulated to when they could be opened up. The one we needed to go through had a two and half hour wait, or at least that’s what the toll booth guy told us. To make matters worse we were stuck at the very back of a long line of semi trucks. We sat there for a minute and discussed our options:

A. Sit  it out and wait
B. Try to find someone that speaks english and see if there’s another way
C. Try to talk the toll booth guys and see if can get through somehow.

After frustration set in, I got out of the car and ran up to the toll to see if I could talk to someone. I’m not sure how it happened, but I some how convinced them that we were in the Olympics and we were late and had to get through. He spoke it over to his boss and the next thing I know the boss comes out yelling something at me, but Aly was like “they are telling us to hurry up to the front and they would let us through.” I can’t believe it worked..

We were so close to the city but couldn’t figure out how to get there. At this point we were driving around randomly till we got closer and closer.

We randomly ran into this guy at one of the lights that spoke perfect English. He had heard that Gumball was coming to town too, and was nice enough to guide us to the hotel. Take a look at the CCTV building on the right. I can’t believe that thing stands up. I wouldn’t want to be in that one part that looks like there no support

Lots of this around the city. Wish “Amazing Awaits” was here.

Pulling into the Westin Hotel for the final stop of the Gumball 3000 2008. We made this place our home for the next three days.

Here’s the crew that got us to the hotel.. Thanks for the help Jamie

This pic says it all..  We made it.. Max, Neals and Cuban Brothers joining in on our excitement.

Look at what I got for three days.. So good….

“Comfortable” babyface

We had a nice little awards ceremony at the hotel night club. We all got medals made by the same company that made the Olympic medals.

They are mad official. Picture of the medal coming soon.