NASCAR Weekend!

Nascar Trivia:

• What state has earned the nickname NASCAR Valley?
• Where was the first NASCAR race held?
• In what year was NASCAR founded?
• What do you and all Nascar drivers have in common?

Okay, if you can answer any of those questions you're probably a huge Nascar fan...David and I are most definitely NOT! So, how did we end up at a huge Nascar race? Easy...David won a contest through work and voila! David and I got an all expense paid weekend away. So it involved attending the Allstate 400. No problem! We had a blast, just the two of us!
We dropped the kids off in Cincinnati with my parents, jumped on a plane for 20 minutes, and landed in Indianapolis. Our first evening there was a special dinner with extremely good food plus an opportunity to meet some of the drivers. I don't know any Nascar drivers but when they announced them I did recognize the name Jeff Gordon (I watch a lot of ESPN!). The other guy, Jimmie Johnson...I thought he was a NFL football coach. Apparently there's a famous Nascar driver with the same name. Well, here I am pictured with Jimmie Johnson...and guess what? He's the one who ended up winning the race!

Of course, this is Jeff Gordon...even I knew who he was. David is still working on mastering his photography. I keep telling him to wait until BOTH people are looking.

We got to explore downtown Indianapolis which didn't take much time because it's not that big. The one thing I will remember about the city is the funky smell.

The day of the race was absolutely gorgeous...not too hot and NO humidity. We got a police escort to the Brickyard which made us all feel so important. On the way there we played a game of Chance...each person paid $5 and got to pick a driver's name out of a bag. Lucky me...I picked Jimmie Johnson. Of course at the time I didn't know that he would be the winner but it helped make the race more exciting for me because I now had someone to root for.

Because David works for Goodyear, everything about the weekend was top-notch...the hotel, the little goodies we received, the dinners, the police escort to the race...and those seats right at the finish line...they weren't too shabby either.

The pageantry before the race was awesome and I couldn't get over the amount of people that were there. Did you all know they say a prayer before the race? I loved that. And the noise...I had to wear earplugs the entire time! I couldn't even hear David shouting things at me during the race. As the cars would drive by, the stands would shake! It was quite an amazing experience.

The actual race was a little boring; they do 160 laps. But Jimmie Johnson moved into first place with about 15 laps to go so it got a little exciting there at the end. I won $125 for his victory!

So, despite the shirtless men, the half-naked women who really should have covered up, and enough second-hand smoke to give me lung cancer several times, I really enjoyed myself. David and I love any opportunity to get away together and having it paid for was even better. It was definitely hard to come home.