Friday, October 24, 2008

NASCAR

For Jimmy's 30th birthday I got him tickets to a NASCAR race at Talladega in Alabama. So we left JT with my sister and we left on Friday morning and drove to Alabama. We took our time getting there, stopping in Memphis, TN to see Elvis. We went to Graceland for a couple hours and went through the tour and saw his house, car collection and airplane.
Pictured below is Elvis' grave along with his parents and grandmother. He orginally was burried in a public cemetary but his dad realized it was to risky to leave him there so they had him moved to his home there at Graceland. At the beginning of the tour they give you these headphones with a self guided tour. Jimmy is looking out to Elvis' pasture with a few horses. It was very peaceful here although the surrounding neighborhood didn't look so peaceful. After eating at this BBQ joint we saw on the Food Network as being the best BBQ in the country we hit the road again in hopes of making it the rest of the way. We arrived in Alabama Friday evening and managed to find a hotel. Saturday we spent the day checking out all the local attractions. We took a train ride in the country which was nice. The train took us to a vinyard where they had pumpkins, face painting and hay ride for kids. It was nice seeing the country side and just relaxing a bit. I believe this picture was taken while we were on the hayride. We drove around and managed to find our hotel that I had made reservations several months ago. We had dinner reservations but had some time to kill so we went to this huge shopping area. It wasn't a mall but sections of stores on different levels of this mountain. It was nice to just walk around and see the scenery.
Sunday was race day so we headed out pretty early expecting some pretty bad traffic. Below is Jimmy at breakfast at the hotel. Can you tell how excited he is?
We were staying about 45 min away from the racetrack and I am glad we left when we did, not because of the traffic but because we had to park so far away and walk, maybe about 2 miles. There was a showcase of former cars that we had a chance to walk around and Jimmy drooled over all the cars and was excited to see.
Our seats were about three stories up and had to use stairs. Jimmy was so excited he was practically running and I was about to go into labor! We got to our seats right as the racing events were getting ready to start. They had F15 Eagle airplanes that flew over us and lit their after burners, the "National Anthem" and "God Bless America" was sung and then they introduced all the drivers! Jimmy wanted these headsets where you can listen to the drivers and other commentators so he headed back down the flight of stairs to find a couple of pairs. He came back empty handed so after I had caught my breath I volunteered to go looking so he wouldn't miss the 'start your engine's' part of the race. Thankfully, I found an elevator and managed to find the headsets pretty quick. This is a picture of Jimmy with his headset on of course. These were also nice because they blocked most of the noise out. You could turn to different channels to listen to different drivers talk with their spotters. I was thankful for them.
Jimmy's favorite driver wrecked in the last few laps so he wasn't able to finish the race but it was still a good race. I felt like the race was like church, stand up and sit down over and over again. We saw two huge wrecks right in front of us and were sitting in front of the pit row and so we could see drivers spin out and almost wreck and also see how fast those guys can change a tire. It is crazy! The stands were set up so after 30 min into the race the sun went behind us and cooled it off a little bit. The people sitting around us were all fans of different drivers but would cheer when our driver would do good and we would do the same when theirs would do good. So much different than a football game. Most of the fans were against one particular driver and when his car went into the wall everyone cheered.
This picture is after the race, most of the people had cleared out and most race cars were already taken into their garage getting ready to move on to the next race.

We had such a great time and were super thankful for the time away from the stresses of our life right now.

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