A MINI Vacation In Vegas Home

AT A GLANCE

AMVIV3 DATES ARE OFFICIAL

AMVIV3 will be March 23-26, 2006.

Cars registered as of 4:00pm 3/17/2006: 221

Weather forecast from Weather.com as of 3/23/2006 and I will not be updating this again.

	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
High temp Low temp Description Rain chance	72° 48° Partly Cloudy 0%	77° 54° Partly Cloudy 0%	78° 51° Mostly Cloudy 0%	73° 49° Mostly Cloudy 10%

AMVIV3 Pre-registrations are now closed

AMVIV3 Farewell Breakfast at Desert MINI registration now open

c3 Club is hosting the official farewell breakfast at Desert MINI on the morning of Sunday, March 26th. Say goodbye to your new and old MINI friends. Have a good breakfast before you hit the road for the Valley of Fire or home. Win some cool prizes. Help Cure Autism Now.

Go here to RSVP.

AMVIV3 featured on MotorTrend's Homepage

MotorTrend Magazine's online presence has added a write-up of AMVIV3 to their "Auto news" section. Read it here.

Group Rate at Palace Station Has Ended

You can no longer receive the price that we arranged for attendees, bit to make sure that you are included in the group, please still tell Palace that you are part of the event under Reservation ID PCIMIN6.

Palace Station Reservations Office: 1-800-634-3101.

AMVIV3 Boot and Bonnet Show will be at Palace Station on both Friday and Saturday

Up until mid-February, we were planning on having day 2 of the Boot and Bonnet Show (vendor day/car show) at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway in conjunction with the Phil Wicks Driving Academy, but with some recent developments, this is not going to be the situation.

The Boot and Bonnet Show will be held on the top floor of the parking garage at Palace Station on both Friday and Saturday. The Phil Wicks Driving Academy will still be at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, as will round 1 of the North American MINI Cooper Championship Series.

Any AMVIV attendee is welcome to head out to the track and get an idea of what happens at a driving school, and to watch the race.

Professional detailing at AMVIV3

Highline Detail, owned by Ryan who is a member of The MINI Motoring Club of Utah will be attending AMVIV, washing and detailing cars. They will be charging $20 for a wash and $100 for a full detail.

AMVIV3 Sub-Event listing is now online

A quick listing of sub-events and times, and the menu for the banquet online now.

AMVIV3 Schedule is now online

If you want to see the schedule of sub-events before you register, or you've already registered and you want to see what you'll be doing so you can plan that Penn and Teller show, have a look here.

Event Mailing List

You can now add yourself to the AMVIV mailing list here. Keep up to date with all the AMVIV news as it happens. We promise not to use your email address for anything other than actual AMVIV related emails, and we won't send too many of those, just the things you need to know.

Attendee Frappr map

Angie in Tulsa has generated a Frappr map for AMVIV3 attendees. Add yourself here, and see where everyone is coming from. Who knows, you might find yourself a new local motoring buddy!.

Event Registration is now open

You can now register for the event, preorder (and pay for) t-shirts, hats and the banquet dinner. You can prepay for park entry to Red Rock Canyon ($5) and Valley of Fire ($7).

If you want a shirt AND a hat, you should buy the combo and save yourself $5.

The banquet will be on the Saturday night, and will be held at Palace Station, so that anyone who might have had a couple of cocktails won't have to drive home after.

The shirt and hat designs have been finalized

Here are the designs as they are going to be printed:
The t-shirt

The hat

Palace Station's Garden rooms have been upgraded from last year

I personally saw one of the refurbished Garden Rooms at Palace, and they are now very nice. You have a choice of 1 king or 2 double beds (not 2 queens as in the tower rooms) and I would be fine with staying in one. During NASCAR weekend, these rooms now rent for $199 a night.

The host hotel will again be Palace Station, and for those who expressed disappointment with the Garden rooms, Palace is in the process of spending a couple of million dollars refurbishing them.

In response to several requests from attendees and vendors, there will be a track event. The Phil Wicks Ultimate MINI Driving Academy will be at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. There are a total of 17 tracks at the Speedway complex, so if you want to, you can drive a NASCAR with the Richard Petty Driving Experience or an Indy car with the Mario Andretti Racing School. The Speedway is also right next to Nellis Air Force base. I was at the track last week to check it out and in about an hour, I saw F-14 Tomcats, A-10 Warthogs and few other types of warplanes flying around. Very cool.

Some of the 2005 attendees will remember an English journalist who was at AMVIV at the request of MINI corporate UK. The first article published about his experience hit the shelves in the July 2005 issue of GoMINI. For more info and to see the article, go here.

I have finally finished the wrap-up and photo page. You can see it here.

I have also created a "thank you" page to acknowledge some of the people without whom AMVIV2 would not have worked out as well as it did. Have a look here.

Thanks, and see you next year,
Andrew Ross aka Agro.

HISTORY

In September of 2003, Dominic Tuso and Andrew Ross started talking about organizing a group drive for about 10 to 20 of the Arizona MINI Owners to visit Las Vegas for a weekend of fun and relaxation. By the time the drive happened in February of 2004, it had snowballed to a national event with MINIs and Minis coming from all over the US, as well as attention from other countries, and somewhere over 200 cars attending (we never did get an accurate count).

That was A MINI Vacation In Vegas. The original. It was such a success and so much fun, that there was an immediate call to start planning a sequel event. After some intense volunteering, it was decided that the Sin City MINI Club would co-ordinate the 2005 event, A MINI Vacation In Vegas II (aka AMVIV2).