Covering the SEMA show in Las Vegas sounds cool on the surface?fly to Vegas on the company dime, do Vegas things, and look at sweet cars?and it mostly lives up to that billing. The only major hurdle is that the show isn?t set up to be covered like a normal auto show at all, which means hustling through narrow hallways and trying to grab photos of cars packed into tiny display booths while jockeying with crowds of people who have a stronger reason for being at the closed-to-the-public SEMA show than we do (that is, to buy or sell products). It?s daunting. So when Hellwig Products contacted us with an offer to sleep overnight on the show floor, in an overland camping vehicle it had built, we figured, ?Hell, that sounds convenient!? Cover show, pass out in a camper inside said show, wake up and keep covering show. Easy!
Forget being the man in a van down by the river; we were signing up to be the man in a van down by the Las Vegas Convention Center. The upshot, besides doing something that we were told no one had ever done in the SEMA show’s 50-year history?indoor camping?was that I was also being given unfettered access to the entirety of the show all night long. To explain the appeal of that last bit, think of it this way: Browsing SEMA by night, with no one else around, would be like seeing a highly anticipated new movie in an empty theater. Pick your seat! Spread out! Do whatever! On a more practical level, the overnight would allow for humanity-free photography. ...