My Crazy Car Week

Apparently, to those who have lived in Carmel for any number of years (or anything longer than 2 months) the second week in August is the best/worst time of the year. It's called Car Week, and the entire Monterey Peninsula is taken over with car enthusiasts. They bring their fancy cars and their classic cars and they show them off at different venues over the course of a week. If you like cars it's a glorious time. If you dislike cars, traffic slowing down to look at said fancy cars, or pedestrians stopping in the street to oogle at cars, you've got to get the heck out of town.

There were so many Ferraris and Lamborghinis and Porshes on the roads that after about a day of dodging dumb-struck tourists we decided to join the crowd and see what all the fuss was about. We headed down the road into town where they had blocked off streets to show off the fancy cars.

We didn't get that far, however, as my Blog-Photographer-in-Training (Toby) started taking pictures of the cars parked on the side streets. 

How would you like to try parallel parking this car? Or worse, trying to fit into a space in front of or behind this guy?

We were interested in finding out about some of these cars, but not to the point of doing anything more strenuous than Googling. I did learn that there was a car coming in for the week that was going to be auctioned off on Sunday that the owners were hoping would fetch $10 million. (It's some old Mercedes. I actually saw it while I was out on a run. It just looked like an old car, to my untrained eyes, but I know now that it was worth more than.... well, it was worth a heck of a lot.) Here are some pictures of the cars in the show. And another site that shows more fancy-pants cars, most of which we saw on one street or another, sometimes just while we were out running Toby to/from school or going to get the mail. 

All in all, we saw more fancy cars than we could count, and we tried to stay off the roads as much as possible. We did have fun imagining how a conversation with our insurance would go if we ever bumped into one of the Ferraris, or worse....