On Tuesday, November 3rd, Pudge, Duval & I started our trip to Las Vegas for THE event of the year - the 38th Annual SEMA Show. SEMA is the Specialty Equipment Market Association, and they have the companies that you need to get in touch with to get any type of aftermarket product for your vehicle. And when I say anything, I do mean ANYTHING - be it tonneau covers, exhausts, wheels, headlights, stereo systems, or my favorite product of the week - a cooking grill that I can hook up to the back end of my new Ram!

Let's start in the beginning. We arrived in Vegas late Tuesday night, or early Wednesday morning, depending on which time zone that we were going off of. Since the entire town was pretty much sold out for this week, we stayed at the Tropicana, 'where Las Vegas began'. When we finally walked the quarter of a mile to our room (for once, I am not exaggerating that distance), the bathroom was dirty. With a simple call to the front desk of the hotel, we had been upgraded to one of the luxury suites that overlooked the strip. That night, we spent a little time in our casino, but hit the sack early.

Wednesday morning, we woke up as bright and early as we get up, and walked to the Excalibur for my favorite breakfast buffet in the world. Pudge stayed at the Excalibur on his first trip to Vegas, and I was to their buffet the last time that I was out three years ago and I have been thinking out that breakfast for the past three years. If you don't know it by now, I am a BIG fan of food! Anyways, I had my wonderful breakfast, and we walked back to our hotel to catch the shuttle bus.

The one thing that I felt SEMA didn't have quite as organized as they could have was their transportation - at least the transportation that ran from our hotel. We waited for about 40 minutes, and when their wasn't any shuttle, and all of the taxi cabs were gone, we started walking. We saw one of the SEMA busses stopping at Paris to pick up attendees, so we hitched a ride.

Arriving at the show, we were amazed! Everybody knows that SEMA is huge, but you don't really realize it until you are there, walking around, trying to take it all in. This year, attendance exceeded 120,000 automotive professionals, and hundreds of exhibitors. After being at the show for only a half an hour, we ran into Pecker, Huppie, Nat and Garrick from Relaxed Atmosphere. Pecker & Huppie had just completed the insane 36 hour drive to Vegas from Pennsylvania without stopping. On the way home, they were going to take a slight detour, and head through California. After catching up on the antics that they had already been up to, we started off to spend the rest of Wednesday & Thursday at the show.

Going through the Truck & SUV section, I was so excited to see everything that I could get! I realized that even though I have been with Pudge for the last four years, and supported him in everything that he goes through to make his truck the awesome vehicle that it is, I never really understood his passion. Now, I could get all of this cool stuff and make my new vehicle what I wanted it to be, not just the truck that it was. We were really interested in checking out all of the different tonneau covers that are in the market - we are leaning towards a full-tilt model that is made by Extang. Duval was also pretty interested in the exhibitors since he had just purchased a '98 Dodge Dakota; even though he had signed away his income for the next five years, he didn't actually have the truck yet when we left, but it was waiting for him when we returned home.

There are always a lot of celebrity appearances at SEMA, such as Jay Leno, Snoop Dogg, Usher, and Mario Andretti, and when you see the big stars just walking around the show with all of us regular people, it takes you a little by surprise; the only one that we saw that had hit the big time was Hulk Hogan.

Continue reading about the rest of our trip to SEMA in Part II.