Gumball 3000!

http://www.gumball3000.com/

So I still dont know quite what this is.
Last week I went to a show with my friends in Ithaca where I saw Antlers, Man Man and Yeasayer and on the way there we saw this car that had a sign that said Gumball 3000 on it. It looked kind of hilarious and I stuck my head out the window and waved and gave the driver a thumbs up and got a friendly wave back. There were some other logos on the car, one for monster energy drink and maybe puma, it just looked so funny. We moved over into the slower lane and the car passed us. It looked like a Ferari and it must have been going close to 100 because for some reason we are going about 80 and it just kinda took off. On the way back from Ithaca, a little ways down from where we saw the Gumball car, we saw there was a bad car accident with a car fliped over the median on its head and maybe a stretcher with a white sheet over it, but I didnt see it, my friend said he saw the stretcher. He could have just been saying that though, he does that stuff sometimes. Anyway, later we found out that the car was a part of this rally or something from London to New York, city Im assuming. Well the other day my friend told me that the car we saw was the car that ended up winning. Again, I dont think its true cause my friend tends to just sort of say things.

AANNNNYYY way, the background wall paper or what have you, to the gumball 3000 website is very funny looking. It is designed with the same logos that were on the Ferari that passed us going 100, and I still cant really figure out what the whole thing is about. I see really fast, nice, expencive looking cars, I see brand names and company logos all over the place, I see celebrities and I see pictures of famous places like San Fancisco's Lumbard street, and still I couldnt really find anything to say what it was. After looking around the site a little more, I found the q and a section, where the first question was what is gumball 3000? Clearly this was the first question because no where else can you find an explanation or description for what it is.

Apparently it is a 3000 mile drive that goes all over the place. It is not described as a race, but as a rally. It costs 30,000 pounds and I just figured out how to make the sign for the pound which looks like this £ YES! I got it. K well anyway, thats almost $50,000. Two years ago it cost $120,000 to just enter the rally. Well thats cause you also pay for flying the car over seas and for parties and yeah, the description to the Gumball 3000 rally said that they have parties every night with eccentrics and celebrities of all kinds and that it is more of a lifestyle than anything else.

It just made me think of how much of a waste this thing actually is. People with a TON of money decide that they want to spend a lot of it for about 8 days of driving, partying all night, then driving all day (drunk?) and partying again. Theres the money they spend to enter, which is used so that they can fly their cars all over the world, theres the money spent on the gas they use going 100 miles an hour all over the country causing accidents on the interstate, then theres the money spent on maintaining the cars, which they end up messing up cause the drivers drive too fast and blow out who knows what on the car. So yeah I just thought there there were a lot of money wasting expences in this rally that seem actually funny to me.

It reminds me of NASCAR, a sport that I feel just sort of wastes a lot of gas. I feel like there are a lot of better things people could be doing with their money and their recources AND the resources they spend their money on! rather than just seeing how fast someone can drive around a track 500 times.

Im not sure, looking at a video of this Gumball 3000 thing, it looks like it could be fun, but I also dont drink and Im pretty sure I have a different mind selt and maybe different deffinition of fun than most of the people in the rally. Travleing around the country sounds fun, meeting new people and seeing what other places is like sounds like fun, but I guess im just not into the sort of glamorous kind of stuff that this rally seems to be about.

Also, the most important thing is that I was right about my friend, he just made up what he was saying about the Ferari we saw winning, there is no winner in the rally...Their all winners!