Trevor and I won’t be driving in this year’s 2009 Gumball Rally but we may take the R8 down to LA to see off our friends from last year and will likely do a live stream in from the Audi R8 in our drive down to LA from San Francisco.

Anyone know of 2009 drivers that will be live-blogging or feeding live video from their car?  Post a link in the comments here - would love to watch this year.

How cool is Picassa for reading lat/long from these?  Here is David Hasselhoff at the San Francisco launch party at the Fairmont Hotel and then me in a jet engine at the airport east of Los Angeles where we loaded the cars onto planes bound for China.

After taking a ride on quite a slow boat from China, the R8 has arrived.  The stickers are still on it (for now).  Still sounds and looks great … but it needs brakes.

Anyone know how to get Google Earth (or any other program) to tell me the speed data?  This came off our dashboard GPS receiver.  I converted the raw data to KML format for Google Earth using the tool that came with the device.  I’d obviously love to see the speed data, though!

You can see some of our wrong turns on the highlighted route ;)  Click to enlarge.

It’s taken a while (mainly because bulk-uploading photos to WordPress is about as easy and convenient as shipping a car to China).

More gumball car pics &  More North Korea pics.

… and, from Max in London, the Post Rally rundown.

Video to follow … I promise.

I’ve managed to clear off the iPhone camera and my digital still camera into 2 new pages:

Cars of the 2008 Gumball Rally

North Korea

And I’ve added a couple of videos to the new video highlights page. There will probably be 20 or so more being uploaded over the next week so check back.

Video Highlights of the Gumball Rally

We’re finally back in San Francisco and back in the office catching up on work. It’s good to be home but we already miss the car and our fellow gumballers. It was the trip of a lifetime and I can’t wait to do another gumball.

I’ve got a ton of hi-def video I need to upload to this blog as well as pictures from several still cameras. I’m also going to cut up our live Justin.tv video into episodes and post them here as well.

Stay tuned.

The port that the cars will leave China from is about 90 miles from Beijing. The cars were dirty and tired after 3,000 miles on 2 continents. They tell us we won’t see the car back in California for a month. We miss it already.

After a major exercise in time wasting at the port where we dropped off the cars for shipment back to the US, we finally made it to Olympic Park in Beijing.  We weren’t there long but the time we did spend was amazing.  Perfect weather, no pollution, and friendly people — just no supercars.

Inside the birds nest

The Nest