LA Auto Show

The LA auto show has been one of my favorite things to go see every year, there are dozens of new cars that the world gets to see for the first time, as well as some cars that people have modified and made incredibly impressive. I love going and seeing whats going to be on the streets next year and seeing what I would want to drive

One of my favorites

This is the 2017 Ford GT from Le Mans, the 24 hour endurance race in France, it had just been shipped back and hasn’t been touched or cleaned up at all.

A great looking AMG

Another great car from the show was another Le Mans car, this time from Mercedes AMG department, unlike the Ford, this was a test mule that never actually got driven. Still very much impressive.

AMG GTR

This is the original 1967 Ford GT Le Mans car, to buy this car would be over 20 million

Another new car

This is the brand new Audi R8, this car had a new facelift and a new V10 engine. This one in particular is a V10 +, in other words, it’s pretty fast.

The most comfortable car in the show

This is a Mercedes S650 Maybach, Mercedes top tier luxury car. This car is powered by a massive W12 motor and also weighs nearly 6000 pounds. It is probably the most comfortable car at the show, it comes stock with TV’s on the back of the driver and passenger, seats as well as massage system in all 4 seats.

Down into the underground portion of the show, the first car we see is a Spyker C8

I have yet to see another Spyker, even in a show. This is a very cool car that is actually made in America.

1995 Toyota Supra

This car might not look like much, however, it  produces almost 2000 horse power out of the 2jz inside. Stock this car made around 300hp, but with some serious upgrading and modifying, engines with over 1000hp are not uncommon.

Ferrari LaFerrari Alperta Edition

I have never seen a LaFerrari in person, but this ins’t just any LaFerrari, this is one of only 25 on earth, and its price tag proves it.

Nissan GTR

Another one of my favorites from the show was this Nissan GTR. This car was designed to compete in all sort of different racing events. It’s also ear deafeningly loud.

Another great car from the Show

This was another great car that I saw. This is a Ferrari 458, but with a little aftermarket modification. This car has nearly 100k put into it onto of the hefty price tag.

 

Last years auto show was a huge success and I am counting down the days till the 2018 Auto show happens. If anyone is at all interested in cars or is bored in LA, highly recommend going and checking out the show.

Gibraltar Waterfall

About a month ago, I went up to Gibraltar with a fellow mad blogger, Caden, and explored around and got a good view of the waterfall.

a view from the drive

Its about a 30 minute drive up Gibraltar, but is very much worth it. We left fairly late in the day and got there just in tie for the sunset. It was very pretty, bt it was very windy and freezing cold.

A picture from the top f the rocks

When u get there, u have to do a short hike about a quarter mile along a trail up hill and u find yourself on top of a pretty big rock formation that makes for a perfect view of nearly all of Santa Barbara and Goleta. This picture was taken just after the sun dipped behind the horizon. After the sun had set, we figured we had a little more time to go down and get a quick peek at the waterfall.

a look at the waterfall

Unfortunately, the waterfall was a little underwhelming. We had just had our last evacuation due to rain and we figured it would be flowing  at least a little more, but we got to see it running and that was pretty cool.

A picture of Dane looking over the edge

The hike was pretty uphill and required a little bit of climbing around in order to get to the best spot. It was pretty cool, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who is afraid of heights or anything of that nature. Im looking forward to going again and hopefully there will be some more water flowing in it next time.

Paris

In December of 2016, my family and I took a spontaneous trip to Paris for my winter break. It was one of the most exciting trips of my life. We went just after the bombing that happened, so everything was on edge, this didn’t stop us from going though.

this is a photo I took just after we left there airport. It was a great first thing to see.

When we first landed, after about 12 hours of flying, it was about 3pm and Paris 9-10 hours ahead so we immediately fell asleep for nearly an entire 24 hours. After all of us had recovered from our intense jetlag, we began to wander around and see what was going on near our apartment. The next day, we went to the louve. arguably the worlds best art museum.

This is a picture of the massive pyramid that was built just outside.

we went and searched almost every inch of that museum, it took us all day pretty much. the main things we saw were several exhibits on Picasso and other famous artist, but we did get to take a peek at the Mona Lisa, unfortunately, that’s where most of the museum was looking and we probably didn’t get within 150 feet, so we could barely see it.

This is a photo of the top of a huge cathedral that we saw just outside of Paris.

The next day that we were there, we took a cab all of the way to Normandy and got to explore the battlefield where D-Day took place. Due to my camera being very moody, none of the very many pictures I took survived that day.

The last day we had in Paris, we were able to check out the war museum (although it had a lot more than just war related things).

This is a very original photo of Pete using his surroundings props for a quality photo.

Overall, it was one of the best trips I have taken, and I look forward to going back some day.

Petersen Museum

Last summer, my dad and I went to tour the Petersen Museum in LA. After about 2 hours of driving through downtown traffic, we finally got there. The Museum is hard to miss with the chrome and red outside it sticks out little. We got inside and the first thing that we saw was a brand new Bugatti that didn’t even have 100 mile on the clock yet.

This is the new Bugatti Chiron. Powered by a quad turbo W16, it makes just over 1500 wheel horse power! And don’t forget it costs just shy of 3 million.

The first thing we did when we got there was go into there private vault full of hundreds of priceless cars. Unfortunately we weren’t allowed to take pictures. Underground they had Steve McQueens Personal Jaguar, a solid gold Delorean that has never been stared up or had oil put in its motor, and several other famous race cars. We came at the right time because they were showing off there Bugatti collection which included the Chiron, Veyron, EB10 and the most expensive car on earth, the Bugatti type 57. They also had a handful for vintage Porsche’s and several unsealed hypercars.

This is the Bugatti Veyron, it is powered by a 16 cylinder engine that makes 1001 horsepower.

these are two bad pictures that I took of the type 57. This car is estimated to be worth more than a quarter billion dollars.

The Petersen also had several cars that were featured in famous movies and TV shows

This is the Rolls Royce that had an appearance in “The Great Gatsby”

This is Walter Whites Pontiac Aztec from “Breaking Bad”

This is the actual Delorean used in all of the “Back to the Future” movies

A pair of very famous Porsche endurance race cars

An angle on the brand new Ford GT with its wild angles and wings

One of my favorite cars from the whole museum was this 100% carbon fiber McLaren P1.

Along with all of these awesome cars that they had on show, they had a car from maybe the coolest guy ever, Ken Block. He is a rally car racer and also a professional stunt driver.

This is a Ford Fiesta the Ken used in Rally and in one of his Gymkhana films

This car was used in one of his Gymkhana films, they are hardcore videos of Ken drifting around cities on public roads and sliding all over the place. Looking forward to going again and seeing some of there new exhibits.

Trip to the Sierras

When I was in 8th grade, I was given the very unique opportunity to go up to a family friends cabin in the middle of nowhere, and it was awesome. It belonged to a rancher in Carpinteria named Tony Brown. His ranch was located in the middle of nowhere in Kern County. It was a vary old cabin and fire pit that was backed up to the Kern river. That river is known for exceptional trout fishing and that’s why we came. The camp was so off the grid that the only way there was a week on horseback of in a helicopter. The helipad had terrible directions and we took got lucky many times on deciding which way to turn. It was about a 5 hour drive to a small town nearby the air field. We spent the night there and had to wake up very early in order to catch the helicopter.

A picture of the roads we took to get to the helipad.

A pretty big waterfall we saw on the way to the helipad

It was a huge relief when we finally found the the helipad and got to finally get out of the car and walk around after hours on the road.

This is everyone loading all of there stuff for the first group that went

Just after the first group left, there was a very faint whistle that escalated quickly to one of the loudest sounds I had ever heard. It was a pair of prototype jets from the airfare that do testing in the canyons around there.

The smudge in the middle of the frame is the best picture i could get of the jets, we had just taken off on our hour long flight.

It was awesome being able to fly over all of this untouched forest. Not many people get to experience seeing the forest, but we got to see from a birds eye view of the endless sea of trees. Unfortunately, like an idiot lost all of the photos that I took on my nice camera.

This is the only photo that survived, it’s of my dad walking up to the camp.

Rivera Golf tournament

I am an avid golfer and love the sport. I play for the high school team and in my second season with them. I also love to watch the pros play golf because I think it helps me improve my game. One day, my dads company gave him the opportunity to go and watch the Northern Trust open (now known as the Genesis Open). This was an awesome opportunity and we had to take them up on it. There were many awesome golfers there, we followed the group with Rory McIlroy, Ricky Fowler, Jason Day and Bubba Watson. It was awesome to see some of the best golfers on earth play up close.

This Is how close we got to Rory and his caddy on the tenth Hole at Rivera

When we got there, we saw Dustin Johnson crush a drive down the fairway on 1, it was one of the, if not the longest drive I have ever seen. After we found the group we wanted to watch, we figured out how difficult it really was to watch them. it was super crowded and pretty difficult to see all the action. When we finally caught up with the group, the first thing I noticed was how short they all were compared to what I thought they were on TV. I am a solid 5’9” and when I saw that Rory, arguably one of the best golfers of all time, was shorter than I was, I was genuinely shocked.

Matt Kuchar on 18

Another great golfer that we watched on 18 is one of my favorite pros, Matt Kuchar. He is a great golfer and a great person. He ended up winning this tournament also. I have a lot of respect for these golfers after they finish, my dad and I watched Matt walk up to the podium and got harassed by well over a hundred people for just about everything. They wanted his hat, his glasses, watch, gloves, shirt and even his shoes. It got pretty ridicules.

This was one of the Tee boxes they hit from

Just to show how crowded these events really are, I got a good picture from about 6 people deep. I loved to watch it all happen live, but I have to say that it is better to watch on TV.

Montecito Car show

Earlier in 2017, I attended the Montecito Car show. It is an annual event that has many very cool and rare cars in attendance. This year was one of the better years, there was over 100 cars that showed up and I thought that most of them were pretty impressively built and maintained. This years theme was old classic American cars, however they invited anyone who wanted to show off their cars.

This was one of the most exciting and Rarest cars at the show, the BMW M1

The regular BMW M1 is rare enough on its own, but this wasn’t any normal M1, this was the racing one that was custom built by btw to be used in endurance racing. they made under 50 of these cars and they sell for upwards of 2-3 million dollars. This car really set the bar for super cars of its time and is one of the most known super cars ever.

This is a Lamborghini Gallardo

Lamborghinis by themselves are known for being race cars for the street, but the owner of this car in particular was not impressed by the 650 wheel horsepower put out by the 5 liter V12, so he decided that he wanted to put a twin turbo kit on the car. This long and incredibly expensive process involves taking the whole engine out and stripping it of many of its factory parts in favor of new custom parts to with stand the boost from the turbos. This car used to make 650 horse power at the wheels, no, it makes nearly 2000 and does quarter mile races at nearly 250 miles an hour. This car is an absolute weapon. This was one of my, if not my favorite car from the show. I wish I had a sound clip from the exhaust because it was one of the best sounding and loudest cars I have ever heard.

This is an authentic Shelby Cobra

This car probably wins the award for the most expensive car at the show. These cars sell for upwards for 10 million dollars at auction. This was a pristine example with only and handful of miles, this was a true Garage queen. Last years show was spectacular and I am really looking forward to this years show.

Spring break

This years spring break was a lot of fun, it was really nice to finally get a break from class and catch up on sleep. I woke up everyday at around noon and ate lunch. it was great. after a few days of laying around and doing nothing, my mom and I headed up to mammoth to ski with friends.

the view from the 6 hour drive

After we finally arrived, we didn’t want to go anywhere because we felt sick from altitude and driving, so we had terrible takeout from a local Chinese restaurant. The next day we went skiing with an instructor since we hadn’t been skiing since last spring break. We started on the easier hills, but eventually got to the blacks on the right side of the mountain, we did one or two schutes and other black diamonds. After a long day of skiing it was great to go sit down at a nice burger place and eat.

the view I woke up to every morning

The last day of our trip was a fun day, we got to put all of the things that we had practiced with the instructor to the test and go on all of the runs we could. We skied all of that mountain and on some of the hardest runs I have ever done. Afterwards, I realized that I forgot to put on sunscreen and lip balm, and since then, I have had a peeling nose and the worst chapped lips I have ever had.

View from the top of the mountain

 

 

 

Super Street

Last Summer, me and my dad made a surprise trip to LA to go see a car show. It was a very spontaneous and exciting trip and my dad and I both had a great time.

This is a race built GTR making over 1000hp

The trip was full of cars that are incredibly rare in the US that I had never seen before, lots of cars that were here were imported from Japan. It is very difficult to import a car from Japan, let alone any country when the car u are trying to import is younger than 25 years old, or wasn’t originally made in the US and pass US safety and exhaust regulations.

This is a picture of Paul Walker personal car that was left to one of his friends after he passed

This specific car took over 3 years to import into the US and has over 100k invested in it. It makes serious horsepower and is deafeningly loud. This is an R34 Nissan Gtr and it was only built in Japan and Europe, that is why it is so difficult to find one in the US. They are incredibly rare and known for being stupid fast. In the day, this car could beat almost every Lamborghini.

This is a Lexus LFA

This is another incredibly rare car that I saw at the show. This car was legal in the US, but only 550 were made. It is known to be one of the best drivers cars around. It is powered by a Lexus V10 that had its exhaust tuned by the musical department in Yamaha. It has been voted the best sounding engine on earth.

A picture of the unique and perfect pitched exhaust

 

This is a picture of a Ferrari that someone had put a wide body kit on

This is a Mazda RX7 that has over 50k invested in it to make it the fastest track car it could possibly be

Marine Biology Field Trip

This is the build where we listened to our lecture

For Biology, we were given the amazing opportunity to go and listen to a lecture by Wendy Schmidt, she talked about all of the bad things that have happened to our oceans and what she and her team are doing to help fix the problem and what we can do as normal citizens can do to help limit our footprint on the environment. The lecture took place at or local University, UCSB and started at 1 o’clock, this let us miss 5th period, lucky us. When we got to the campus, we took a very brief tour of all of the buildings and then were guided to the building where the lecture was held, in the Marine Bio labs. After letting everyone know where the meeting place was, we were given some free time to go and explore the campus/get food. we walked through a huge hall that led to a big plaza with a lot of little fast food restaurants to eat at. after our lunch break was over, we all headed back to our meeting place at the marine bio labs and watched the lecture. Wendy was a very talented speaker and spoke for a good hour and a half about how she and her team are helping research the ocean and their efforts too help clean up our act and help preserve the ocean.

The lecture room. Featuring Joe’s head.

After listening to the lecture, we then walked to the engineering lab where we listened to 3 more speakers talk about all of the things that they do in the labs. Unfortunately, one of the students made a mistake and set off an emergency shower for people that are covered in chemicals while walking to the room where the speakers were. They were very interesting talks that we listened to for another good hour. The first person to talk was a guy who was in his last year of college and he was researching he alternatives to lightbulbs and how he was doing it. The second person to speak was a women who was and undergrad just finishing up, she worked on making medicines more effective and helping them work better and faster with less of the side effects which is very tedious work.

Another picture to show how crowded the lectures are

The third and last person to talk was talking about how with colored lights, he can print very complex things, similar to 3d printing. He showed us models that he had made using lights and a dish with liquid rubber. Overall it was a great trip and I hope that the future sophomores will be able to do it again.