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If you go and do the whole tour, it is one Long cruise. You get up early in the morning and either go to the driver's meeting or take off on your own. Then after the right number of miles, you arrive at your final destination. Now for the one thing that many have to get used to. If you are driving all day and you get to the evening cruise-in, you will undoubtedly have to park away from the festivities, because the locals of that city have gotten there before you and got all of the close parking. that is just a fact of life---UNLESS you have such a killer vehicle that one of the Hot Rod Vendors choses you to park at their booth. Now, party all night and get up the next day and drive again. Make sure that you look at your motel reservations closely, it can get expensive. We also had a little motel roulette performed on some of us, this last year. The motels got together and cancelled some reservations and had you go to another motel that charged twice the rate, then the ones that were supposed to go to that motel got moved to another at the same duobled rate. After we left, I am sure they were just laughing their butts off.

No complaints on the friends that you will make and the cars that you will see. It is just a long exhausting trip and some good times, some great times and then some not so good. Last year we had one of the tour participants killed by an overanxious driver, passing cars on a two lane. She hit his car and killed him instantly and his son was put into the hospital. however, for all of the years that they have been doing the Tour--it has been with a great record. We did also have one guy get shot at in Alabama, when the driver of the offending car clipped his Mustang and he tried to catch them. Three bullet holes in his car door and a scratch on his arm.

I have done the "Long Haul" a couple times since the very first one and made several short runs with the tour over the years. I have friends that have done every one of the long trips. It makes for a different vacation. We did the trip this last year and our round trip was just over 3000 from home to back to home. Eleven States in seven days. We almost put the truck over the side of the mountain between Bowling Green and Chattanooga on wet pavement, when a Buick Grand National locked them up in front of me. Scooped a couple pounds out of the cab after that.