Three weeks to GATS and I get brilliant idea to enter the Caffcadia in Pride and Polish Competition Truck Show.
Cliff’s Note on our adventure:
 We run our butts off till Monday the week of the show and have to have the truck in the convention center on Wednesday morning.
 Decide we cannot afford to have truck professional polished and while passing through Arizona on Sunday stop and have tool boxes polished for $40.00.
 Unload Monday morning in El Paso and spend the day getting to Dallas.
 Tuesday morning get truck washed and spend the morning listening to the rain.  Bob is using the truck as an umbrella while he touches up the undercarriage at the truck stop.
I spend the day with cleaning rags and Q-Tips cleaning the sleeper and wiping down the cab of the truck.
 Wednesday morning we drive to convention area to stage and see many of the show trucks and wonder, “What in the h*** were we thinking!”?  We were totally intimidated by these trucks.
We finally get ready to head up to the show and the gate guard wants to send us to the docks.  We have watched the show trucks go up this ramp and know we are at the right area.  We again say NO we are in the show and he finally calls someone who says they will be right down.  We again tell him we are entered in the Pride and Polish show and he repeats to person on the phone and we finally get permission to go up the ramp.  Now we are totally dejected…
We were next met by the Pride and Polish officials who actually acknowledge we are in the show and get us to our official show spot. 
 Bob eyeballs the tires and rotates them so they are perfectly straight up and down having no clue the judges would drop a plum bob and make sure they were perfect!  Which they tuned out to be and the judges were pretty impressed with this.
One of the shocks was that we had to disconnect the batteries that got rid of my idea of subtle mood lighting so no wear would be shown on the sleeper.  The judges instead use special LED flashlights which SHOW EVERYTHING.
 We spend Wednesday wiping down the truck and by the evening we are done and exhausted.
 Thursday morning here comes the first set of judges and the first thing they do is look inside the cab of the truck and he sticks his finger up the vent for the floor air and finds OH MY DUST…. I tell him wait I did not enter the cab only the sleeper… I am quickly informed that it is a total picture.  Dang I used the q-tips on the sleeper vents but not the cab vents.  The judge then pulled down the visor and was surprised to find no dust here!  Now I was proud of myself for that one.
 Then we wait for the next set of judges to go over the exterior.  They felt everything and then they popped the hood… Bob had not polished all of the rubber hoses and he says we did not enter the motor and as you can imagine they come back with “it is a total picture!”  They did find some dust in a few places Bob missed but not much.  They did offer ideas on how next time to go over all of the rubber hoses which we will do.
We knew that we would also be judged and Bob wore a suit jacket and tie and I wore my Mickey Mouse shirt and matching earrings to go along with the sleeper theme.  Looking back at it, weshould have worn our FedEx uniforms, which consist of slacks, button down shirt and tie for Bob and a skirt and button down shirt for me with the FedEx logo.
The judges were all very nice and easy to talk with.  There ideas were to add some flames or pin stripping which we cannot do.  Have to have all white truck.  Next one of the judges said a really nice HUGE drop down visor would look slick.  Heaven forbid can you imagine what that would do to our fuel mileage.  That is when we decided that we really did not have a show truck.
 The judging is done and we have to wait till Saturday for the results.
 We were pretty sure we were the only truck entered in aftermarket sleeper so we thought we would do ok there but did not expect anything on the truck.
 We attended the awards ceremony along with a lot of other people.  What was pretty cool looking was how many people had their trucks colors and names on some pretty awesome looking outfits. 
 They had a really neat awards area with big screens and as a truck was announced the picture of the truck would come up on the screen.  It was sharp.  They went through several classes and we patiently waiting for after market sleeper.  They called 2010 and newer working bob tail and announced third place, then second place and then US.  We just sat there stunned and finally we looked at each other and said that is US. You could not wipe the smile off of our faces and we went forward to get our trophy. 
 Next came after market sleeper and once again the Caffcadia was up on the screen and we went up to receive our first place trophy.
 We spent the rest of the day in shock as we received congratulations from a whole lot of people who also questioned if a working truck that had not spent a week down being polished and with out a custom paint job would do well.