Most liked posts in thread: MINIs take Route 66 - Who's going?

It's a facebook only group..
Essentially one guy wanted to do the drive and opened it up to the MINI community, and it snowballed into big.

 

We threaded the needle..
It poured in Chicagoland about 30 minutes before we left Thursday morning, but was clear when we hit the road.
Sky's were threatening all the way down to St. Louis and streets were wet in many parts but no rain.
The heavy storms in central Illinois went thru not long after we went past

It rained heavily Friday overnight, but was clear in the morning.

Today it rained all day, but we were already home.

 

Really fun trip.. I was only able to do a few days from St. Louis to Joliet but had a great time.

MINI of St. Louis pulled out all the stops and hosted a great party for around 100 MINIs.. Food trucks, Ice Cream, raffles. Really well done.

Springfield had huge storms/tornados the day before we arrived, and about half the city was out of power. There was some scrambling for hotel rooms (my hotel had no power when we first arrived around 2pm, but after touring downtown and dinner power was resumed and all was good, except for no TV (not really a big deal). We were worn out so did not attend the evening drive-in movie.. looks like there were 20 or so MINIs in attendance.

MINIUSA provided tickets to a minor league baseball game in Joliet, but we opted to keep going the extra hour and head home earlier instead.

probably 60-80 MINIs for the drives in the days I was there.. Many people traveled in groups, we went mostly on our own stopping when we wanted and crossed paths with other MINIs a few times thru the day.

Looks like a smaller group braved the rainy weather today and made it downtown to the start sign. NASCAR crowds are probably much smaller due to the rainy Chicagoland weather today.

Here is a link to my pics for the few days:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/ernestovumbles/albums/72177720309420666