L’OE AND BEHOLD
The last time we saw a car show totally take over a whole town and surrounding villages it was in Austria surrounding a like called Wörthersee. While America’s monstrous L’oe Show event may look great online, nothing quite beats sampling this beast for real.
Jessica Paige’s ‘76 hazelnut and chocolate Audi 100 was absolutely melting into the pavement under the Liqui-Moly bouncy arch.
If you’ve never been to The Grand Canyon in the Southwestern United States, you should go. It’s one of those places that can’t truly be appreciated until you’ve stood at the South Rim and observed the slightly grayed-out appearance of the North Rim due to the sheer volume of atmosphere in between. It’s a hole of an entirely overwhelming scale, and it exceeds your expectations in person.
L’oe Show is like that. Four days of events and get-togethers in and around Pottstown, PA, culminating in an absolutely mobbed Volkswagen Auto Group street festival. You can watch videos and look at photos, but you can’t truly appreciate just how massive it is until you’ve walked up High Street on show day. It’s like a Metallica concert with a swap meet.
Theoretically, one could hopscotch around town and hit each of the twenty-plus events from Thursday to Sunday, but that may not be the best play.
All the classic and modified GTIs in the continental United States gathered for some group photos to commemorate fifty years of the GTI. That’s fifty, as in five decades. Honestly, it’s a bit difficult to imagine people being that cool that long ago.
Despite the overwhelming scale, L’oe Show is pretty dialed, five years in. There seems to be a plan for just about everything that can be controlled. There are vendors and sponsors as far as you can see, and every storefront is part of the show. There are parks and restaurants and benches and beer gardens and food carts and thousands upon thousands of people. And there are absolutely no signs of slowing.
