Caleb's last pinewood derby

Caleb made his last pinewood derby car this month....sniff, sniff.....but not to worry! We will have one year off, and then Isaiah can start tiger scouts and we can do four more cars! I really need to vent about how they run the pinewood derby here in Maui. Once the boys get their cars weighed and turned in, they never touch them again until they are eliminated from the race. The leaders do all the racing, which was kind of the whole fun for the boys. The track is surrounded with caution tape, and one or two guys put all the cars on the track and everyone just tries to crowd around and hopefully see when their car is racing. It really stinks! They didn't even really have a track at the scout office that you could borrow for your own races until this year. When the cars are eliminated, they have another track set up for the boys to play on, so even though the boys hope their's is the winner, they are all kind of hoping that they'll loose so they can race their own cars.

They were doing double elimination....Caleb won his first race by a hair, lost the second one, and then won like four in a row, before he was eliminated. There were only about 8 cars left when he got out, so he did pretty good. After that, we never saw him, because he was at the practice track, running his car ragged. The were putting all kinds of things on the track for the cars to race or hit....soda bottles, rocks, cell phones, other cars....you get the picture. He came back just once, because one of the front wheels came off and went under the track, and we had a few spares, so he just replaced it and ran right back over there. That was his fun for the day. They also do the raingutter rigatta at the same time as the pinewood derby, and they have the packs set up boothes so the boys and thier families have something to do while the men are racing the cars. It isn't a total loss, but I'm still grateful that Caleb started as a Tiger scout in Juneau, and was able to race his own car the first time.

All 69 cars that raced on Saturday.

This is the guy who gets to race all the cars....and Caleb's car is the red one with the yellow arrow on it. It is supposed to represent the arrow of light he is working to acheive.

This was his first race. The cars raced like this all the way down the track, and his pulled ahead just at the end.

Caleb won an award at the end for the best hot rod car. They spelled his name "Caleb Gensen".....duh!