The past Saturday was the annual Greenwood Auto Show. It’s a mile of classic cars and more – and it’s not something I don’t go every year, various circumstances prevent that from happening, and usually I don’t get to go the whole length of the event. This year, however, we did. Mostly.
Greenwood Avenue shuts down from 90th to 67th every year for the event, and our house is in the middle of the course, literally a block and a half away. First we walked around to one end of the car show, taking the side street. I hate doubling back and looking at the same thing twice – it feels like wasted effort.
The kids were surprisingly interested in checking out a number of the cars. I’m trying to remember where Laura was, she might have been working on lesson plans for summer school, but the bottom line was I had the kids. Xavier was in the stroller, and I was hoping the crowd wouldn’t have gotten too thick early enough in the day starting off just before 10am.
One of the craziest things at the auto show
Over the course of the first half the kids got balloons, some free popcorn, spun a prize wheel (getting frisbees and a hat) and checked out a number of vehicles. at about the halfway point, we turned off on our street and had lunch at home. Xavier stayed home and had his nap.
Just as we were about to turn home, however, we saw a custom ride that simply needed to be… seen to be believed.
There were plenty of old cars for the kids (and me) to check out, and those that looked like race cars, or they could have appeared in some capacity in the movie Cars obviously got more than a little attention from Ciárán. Déla really seemed interested in the older (pre-50s) roadsters.
Getting there early certainly seemed to be the right thing to do. We would have stayed and gone down the whole mile but I wanted to get home, get the kids some lunch and get Xavier down for nap. Since we do live a block and a half away, it would be easy enough to head back out after lunch.
The front of the car is the door!
And we did. Boy, was it crowded in the afternoon.
Déla elected to stay home while Laura did more work and Xavier napped, so it was just me, August and Ciárán. The two boys elected to bring coats with them because of the intermittent sprinkles, but not surprisingly regretted doing so.
I do wish I were able to get more pictures of the show itself. Each of those shots came out horribly.
Ciaran with his favorite car of the show
Ciárán held up really well, despite walking essentially what was 2 miles. I was actually surprised at his level of interested in the various cars that didn’t look like they were in the movie Cars.
I bought the boys some ice cream as well as some treats from one of the local Girl Scout troops which had a booth. They were having a great time of it – then we saw this hot rod covered in flames. Ciárán was transfixed. We spent quite a bit of time with this one vehicle.
Towards the end of our journey we came across a group of hot rods from a specific group, the Rat Bastards. Ciárán took a particular liking to a car that had a heck of a lot of work done to give it a spider motif – including a spiderweb open roof. One of the big rules of the show, or any show like this, is you don’t touch the cars. The owner of this car, however, let Ciárán actually get in the car.
Of course he let August in as well instead of having the poor guy stand there envious. It was very nice of him.
Just a couple of blocks later we reached the point where we had come to before – the halfway point, our street. It was time to go home. A fun day was had, and a successful outing portends to having another turn next year.