It’s almost the end of our adventure. We now live in Azusa, about an hour from LA. We have a nice canyon that is part of the San Gabriel Forest, where there is another local specialty, the OHV park. Our BnB is along the Highway 39 and every weekend, we see big SUVs, pickups and buggies go to the the OHV area to play in the mud. This is how it looks like:
- Close by there’s the Irwindale Speedway: there’s a race track and a drag track where people come every Thursday night to compete against the clock. The race track is used for different type of racing:
- Nascar
- Nascar Truck
- Drift
- Night of Destruction (with many sub-genres, such as School Bus racing, Trailer racing, Figure of 8, etc)
We were supposed to go see the drag racing on Thursday night but missed it, so we decided to go on this Saturday as there were two events: a drift competition and a drag race. There was also a car show, which is always cool.
We were a bit early for the drift competition on the main track, but there was gymkhana showdown, people bring their car to show their skills, all kinds of cars, from daily drivers to competition models. The first one we saw bounced on the side wall and had a couple thousands of dollars worth of body and paint work at the end of his show. The second one had a brand new pickup truck, pretty scary to see that heavy thing spinning like this.
Then we went to the drag strip. Drag racing is a tradition here, it’s pretty cheap, some people spend their week tuning their car to get a couple of fraction of seconds. Again all kinds of cars, daily drivers, pickup trucks, vintage cars, there’s even a mini-dragster category for kids.
It was funny, we had a good time with Basile though he doesn’t like too much the noise and smoke. Won’t be easy to convert that population to green transportation… !!
