Dates: August 7th - August 16th, 2004
Location: Tennessee

 We hit the road around 5:00 P.M. on Saturday on our way to Summertown, Tennessee; our plans were to go to Wes Heatherly’s house on Sunday, film around there until Wednesday and then head to the infamous Lorretta Lynn’s Dude Ranch. On the way to Tennessee we stopped by Indianapolis to hang out with another Innervision rider, Brock Lyons. As we pull into his place he is riding his 50 around his track, after a short discussion we decide to grab some food at Hooters (we like the food). On our way to Hooters we drove past the Brickyard ( Indianapolis raceway), we forgot that the Brickyard race was the next day. There were swarms of people running around drunk and partying, the street in front of the brickyard was literally packed full of people for at least 7 or 8 blocks, however, after only about 30 minutes the police had shut everything down and there was nothing left. We head back to Brocks place and crash for the night.

  Sunday around 10:00 in the morning, we leave Brocks place and head to Summertown, TN. We arrive in Summertown around 7:00 on Sunday. After visiting with Wes and the rest of his family, as well as making plans for the morning we head for bed. It was a very uneventful day.

  Monday morning we wake up and set up our equipment for the days shoot, we had to wait until 3:00 for Wes to get home from class but when he got home we started surveying his private track and took a look at what we could accomplish, after a few hours of riding, we had some dinner and then headed out to get crazy at night. There wasn’t a whole lot to do in Summertown so we had to get creative, we started by convincing some local guys to take there dirt bike down a local highway through a very busy commercial section, they did it but I have to admit it was pretty weak. After that we decided to have some fun with the local church signs by changing the wording a little. After realizing that Summertown didn’t have a whole lot to offer we again went to bed.

 

 The next few days were generally the same; we did some riding during the day and got a little crazy at night. We did manage to invent a new backyard game though; we took a rope and tied it to the back of our Yamaha Rhino added a knee board and we had grass knee boarding, we spent at least 10 hours doing that and left with a few scrapes and bruises but it was still fun.

 Wednesday night we left Summertown and headed for Hurricane Mills, TN to Lorretta Lynn’s Dude Ranch for Round 12 of the GNC circuit. We had to get there early because Lorretta’s always fills up fast, there is always a huge turn out (over 800 entries this year) Which always amazes me because, in my opinion, Lorretta’s is by far the worst track on the circuit and has the worst promoters running it, however, the facilities are excellent. Thursday was a pretty basic day, riders were coming in all day and getting set up and ready for the weekend. We spent the day talking with our riders and doing some basic shooting and screwing around, we did a few of our “rig” shoots (a bonus in Carpe Diem where we take you inside the riders rigs) we also met with Freddie Shepard the owner  of Blingstar to discuss the arrangements for the party Innervision was co-sponsoring with them. I decided not to race this round because we had so much to do throughout the weekend. We had a lot of fun throughout the weekend, between watching all the races and partying at night, we found a guy that can pull some mad wheelies in a golf cart and some beautiful girls that wanted to hang out and be on camera.

  We spent the night screwing with the security guards, Klint Anderson had his golf cart loaded down with people and we had our Yamaha Rhino with at least 6 people on it. We were supposed to have lights on your vehicle after dark, which we did but Klint did not, so after security warned them once they got a flashlight and held it up as they drove, apparently that wasn’t good enough for the security guards so they taped the lights onto the front bumper, yet the guards didn’t like that either and they told them to put the cart away. Klint got kind of mad about that and went to Rita (Rita Coombs is the lady in charge of Racer Productions, the promoter for Lorretta’s) and told her that the security guard pulled a gun on him, we didn’t see that guard the rest of the weekend. The rest of the weekend went smoothly, Joe Byrd won the pro class (he always does good at Loretta’s) Around 6:00 we packed up and headed for home, we got home on Monday and we fly out to Arizona on Thursday to film with Skyler Stewart and August Goebel. It should be a good time.

Brad Phillips