SJVMC St. Patrick's Day Poker Run - March 16 & 17, 2001

The San Joaquin Valley Miata Club puts on a poker run every St. Patrick's day. Genny and Bob decided to make participation a mini-vacation.

The start is at the Best Western Clovis Cole in Clovis. We make reservations there for both Friday and Saturday nights. We take a leisurely drive down HWY 49 most of the way there and arrive around 3:30 in the afternoon. There are a few Miata's in the parking lot and a couple of people in the hospitality suite. We check in and say hello before going out and cleaning all the bugs off the car. That night we have dinner with Jeanne and Robin.

Saturday morning finds all the Miata's lined up and ready to go. There are 42 cars registered for the event. We get our first card at the start. Our staring position is somewhere in the first half. Jeanne and Robin are right behind us. We work our way through (or is it around?) Clovis to the second stop and second card. We switch drivers. We now have both Robin & Jeanne and Joe & Carol following us. The road starts to get a little twistier and we eventually reach the 5000 foot level (it's cold up there!). Along the way we pass most of the cars that left before us so we are the third or fourth to arrive at the lunch stop. We get our third card at lunch. We switch drivers again and are the second car to leave. Robin and Joe are right behind us again. The lead car misses a turn and we get by so now we're first (Yay!). After we get out of the twisties and back to level ground, we get our last stop and forth card. We switch drivers again and are off to the finish, back at the hotel where we get our fifth card. We had a good middle of the road hand pair of 5's Ace high. Not good enough to win and too good to be the worse hand.

Saturday night there's a dinner at the Elk's club along with a raffle. We win a few neat things.

Sunday we drive home, taking the freeway this time. The freeway is faster but it is not nearly so relaxing. Next year we'll take 49 both there and back.