Deckin’ out The Hot Box

Now, I know that I already told you about the Festival of Slow at Goodwood Stadium and how we saw so many cool cars decked out in their Mongol Rally attire, but what I didn’t tell you about was how we pimped out our ride downtown London the day before.

Organizing our Sponsor Stickers

It was like Christmas when our teammate Rick Griffin arrived with our sponsor stickers provided by Daily Stickers.com

We had 3 copies of each sponsor, each in different sizes and we couldn’t wait to get out and decorate our little Nissan Almera provided by the good people of AllWays Campervan and Car Rentals in New Zealand.

The first challenge was figuring out where we were going to place them all so that everyone could see them. The second was sticking them on without making a mistake, causing any bubbles or ripping any of the material.

It was a challenging job.

Dressed in our team T-Shirt we set out to the streets of London to start our days work.

Dave and I went to take the car out of the garage and we parked on the road downtown. It was 4 Pounds an hour to park on the street, so we decided to risk it and skip paying. As long as we stayed with the car, we decided that we could possibly talk them out of giving us a ticket. We would play dumb and pretend that we didn’t know how to pay. That shouldn’t be too hard for us to look a little slow;-) (see the picture below)

It all worked out too. We lasted 4 hours without anyone giving us a second glance. At one point a parking attended went by, but he just looked at us curiously and kept walking. The police drove by once and stopped to wave for my camera while I was videoing the moment, they didn’t even ask what we were up to.

And only 1 person asked us what we were doing during the entire 4 hours!

People strolled on the sidewalk without noticing us. I guess people crawl on the roofs of their cars and sprawl out all over the sidewalks of London on a regular basis because we didn’t get a second glance from anyone.

We didn’t mind though, we were happy not to get a ticket.

It took us a while to come up with interesting places to place the stickers. We wanted everyone to have a fair and prominent spot on the car while having the car look fun and exciting at the same time. Rick and I both agreed that we wanted the car plastered with stickers. Let’s try to use all three of each sponsors stickers. That way everyone will show up on both sides of the car and either on the back or the front of the car.

It worked out well, but we had to talk Mr. Griffin out of placing his own sticker in the middle of the windshield :-D

Once we got the hang of using the squeegee to smooth out the wrinkles and bubbles on the stickers, we started to move along and everyone got to work on their own little corner.

Our ride looked amazing and we couldn’t wait to get to Goodwood to pick up the rest of our stickers. We had to leave room on the hood and the front doors for the Adventurists Official Mongol Rally decals, but we felt that the car was really starting to look the part of a genuine rally vehicle.

We felt that something was missing though. A little bit of fun.

So, Rick took some left over stickers and cut out the names Sherry, Rick, Dave, Deb and put the awesome tagline on the bumper…

“Tweet Our Dust”

That was the finishing touch and we all agreed that putting stickers on a car is a lot of fun and that our little “hot box” looks amazing!