Scion United Event

Today was the day. The Scion United Event. Its been a long day, but I’ll do my best to recap completely without rambling. It was pretty awesome.

Kerry and I started the day with a nice and easy breakfast from the coffee shop in the hotel and took a short shuttle ride into the main village here. Its basically an outdoor mall with lots of little shops, kind touristy but at the same time appealing to the people who actually live here. There is also a casino here. Nothing large, but it has all the usual slot machines and tables. We spent a short amount of time making our donation to the Nevada gaming commission before wrapping up the rest of our free time in an Irish pub.

Once we got to the event, the fun and swag started rolling. They had a few extremely unique cars parked right in front, it looked like at least some of them were corporately owned, but one or two of them may have been other peoples cars. Everything was in tents to at least provide some shade, and there were carts all around with free water, chips, pretzels, ice creams etc to keep everybody cool.

I straight away went to the tent where they were giving out free stuff to the owners. I got a shift knob, and the Scion carbon fiber B-pillar inserts along with some stickers and whatnot. Kerry and I also made a round in the tent where all the 3rd party companies were. More awesome corporate scions and free swag (pens, lanyards etc). There were a few items worth noting though. Alpine had a decibel booth setup where you could go into a small room, and they’d crank up the sound system to reach nearly 145dB. (thats roughly 10x louder than a jet engine BTW). TRD had a booth in this tent as well, and they had THE BEST swag to offer, a set of wheels were to be raffled off at 6:30 (or so the sign said, and the people at the booth told me, but more on that later). They were also doing a live installation of a TRD supercharger in an xD xB right there in the tent.

We toured more of the cars on display, merchandise etc. I stopped by one booth and meet Chris Rado and Ken Gushi. I ventured into the “Paint a Scion” tent, mostly because I was boggled as to what this meant when I read it on the list of things to do. It turned out that they had ceramic xB’s and paint so you could create your own custom xB. Mine came out looking like a 2 year old made it, so I don’t have any pictures of it.

Pioneer had a cool tent as well, they had a live DJ spinning sounds, and video that was projected in 360° on the domed ceiling. I tried to take pictures, but the tent was lit to look cool to a human eye, and my camera couldn’t make sense of it. We also got t-shirts custom made for us (we chose the colors and designs and they silk screened the shirts right there).

After spending a few hours touring everything we got off our feet at the hospitality tent (which was air-conditioned) and drank some water and munched on some snacks for about half an hour. When about 6:25 rolled around, I walked over to the TRD booth for the raffle and was completely disappointed. Turns out, whoever was running the event asked TRD to move the raffle up to 6:15, but forgot to tell anyone. So the winners were chosen, but you had to be present to win, so a ton of people were likely skipped and a few people got quite upset at the debacle.

Dinner was served around 7:30. We had salad, green beans, potatoes au gratin, turkey & roast beef. I was pretty famished, and I think Kerry was too, because both of us polished off our plates. Scion gave out more raffle items during dinner (non of which I won) and after a cake desert, herded us onto the main stage, where the mysterious secret event was to hold place.

The secret was threefold as it turns out. The major item (and something I somewhat expected) was the unveiling of the Scion xD RS1. I was in a horrible spot for taking pictures of it, so I apologies, but I was told I would get a chance to see it up close tomorrow, so I’ll get better pictures then. The other two events weren’t really my style, but it was fun all the same. They had Redman and then Flow Rider perform on stage (both are rappers for those that don’t know).

So after a very long day, and a bus ride back to the hotel I spent some time here going through the pictures (you can see all of them from the day here) and writing this entry. So I’m going to log off for the night, and get some rest. I have a long drive home tomorrow.