Had a great time at the Chicagoland Emergency Vehicle Show

posted @ Monday, August 6, 2007

The show this year was huge. There were a lot of great vehicles and Dave Weaver did a superb job putting on the show. Project Responder took home the first place award for the best Firefighting Public Relations Vehicle and everyone had a great time. One entrant actually brought his restored police car all the way from Connecticut.

Now the night before the show, we all drove our vehicles in the annual lights and siren parade through North Aurora. This parade gets bigger every year. When the parade was over, one of spectators came by to impress upon me how loud the siren is on my truck. She said it was the loudest vehicle that passed by. I guess I'm going to have to find some way of measuring the decibel output one of these days.

The weather wasn't too bad and the rain held off till the end of the show. I met a lot of great folks and my favorite fire truck was there again this year, an American LaFrance pumper that the owner has spent countless hours (and money) restoring. It's an amazing piece of work.

I took photos of each of the vehicles that were there in the show. I'll have them all online in the photo gallery by the end of the week, hopefully. I think the unofficial number is somewhere around two hundred. I'll know for sure when I finish photo editing.

Next to me at the show was a public relations vehicle that was built by a father and son. It was a miniature fire truck built on a go-kart chassis. It was really well done and the kids there really loved it. In fact, they kind of stole some of Project Responder's thunder because it was kid sized. We talked for most of the show about our various pitfalls and setbacks. It turns out we shared a lot in that department. They also had a cool little electric scooter that the dad had purchased from Sam's. Now I had been thinking about buying an ATV or a golf cart to use for getting around the show grounds, but this was really neat, and not very expensive. They even let me take it for spin and I was sold. So I ended up calling my local Sam's to make sure they had one and now I'll be zipping around the shows from now on, quietly and effortlessly which will be such a welcome change.

So if you'd like to know more about the show, or see the photos, visit the show section and the photo gallery. If your vehicle is there and you'd like to have the description changed, just drop me an email and I'll get it updated for you.

Thanks again to Dave Weaver for putting on such a great show and I'm already looking forward to being there again next year.

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