Flaming Car Show (personal story)

Note: This is more of one of those "had to be there" type moments, but it was quite a fun afternoon for me several years ago. When I'm talking about the Jeep, this is roughly what I'm talking about:
Photo credit: www.mrmoms.org
Just imagine this with bigger tires and shocks, and you've got what I'm talking about.


A few years back, I was spending some time with a good friend of the family’s in Louisville, KY. This is something we often do, and there’s usually something interesting to do. On this particular visit, we were going to enter one of their Jeeps (a modified CJ-7 Scrambler that was primarily an off-road vehicle) into a local car show. That morning, we loaded some water into a cooler, as it was supposed to be a rather hot day. We (my brother, our good friend Dale, and Dale’s father, and I) then proceeded to go to Dale’s office to get a ramp that is used to show the capabilities of the suspension package of the Jeep. After loading the ramp onto a trailer and connecting the trailer to the Jeep, we made our way to the parking lot of a strip mall where the car show was being held. We paid the entrance fee, found a spot, set up the ramp, and drove the front tire up the ramp until the tire was about 3 to 4 feet off the ground. A crowd almost instantly gathered around us. At that moment, I felt like someone of vast importance getting out of the Jeep. After a short while, we decided to get breakfast at the nearby Hardee’s. Dale, my brother, and I then went to look around at the stores in the strip mall. The one store that stood out particularly to us was the Ace Hardware store. We are all pyromaniacs, so we bought some automotive starting fluid as well as some carburetor and choke cleaner (both highly flammable substances. We received some odd looks (we were all less than 15 at the time), but were able to purchase the items. Dale had brought a lighter with him, so we went behind the strip mall and started spraying the fluids on the ground and lighting them. While behind the strip mall, we encountered an old couch that looked like it was being thrown out. Of course we set it on fire, but quickly extinguished the flame. We soon tired of wandering around aimlessly behind the strip mall, finding various other things to set ablaze, and soon enough we came upon a construction site that was obviously not inhabited at the time. Needless to say, we wandered in to what we speculated would become an office building eventually. There was lots of interesting objects to set on fire, ranging from empty beer bottles, to dried-up paint buckets, to trash cans. No object was spared, although no apparent physical damage was caused (none too bad anyways). It was while setting fire to the starting fluid that had been sprayed on the floor when we heard a police siren off in the distance. Obviously, being as young and paranoid as we were, we got out of the site and back to the car as soon as we possibly could and stayed in the general vicinity of the car until it was time to go. We didn’t win the car show that day, and decided it was a “good-‘ol-boy” system in place (people running the show giving the award to their friends in the show).