North Carolina Part 2

We picked the middle of October to go to North Carolina for a specific reason: to go the Bank of America 500 and the NASCAR Hall of Fame. I hold Lisa and Evan (mostly Evan) soley responsible for Jared's love of cars racing around a track. He never really followed NASCAR until we went to the Indy 500 with them a couple years ago. Even though that was a Formula One race and not NASCAR, ever since then he has been all about the race world.

Lisa and Evan live in Holly Springs, which is about 3 hours from NASCAR headquarters in Charlotte. We stayed in a hotel in Charlotte the night before the race. (The hotel, might I say, was something to be desired. I picked it though, which means that they won't give me that assignment anymore!)

We got up early on Saturday morning and headed to the NASCAR Hall of Fame. We were pretty much the only people there on Saturday morning at 8:00, which worked out perfectly.

The Hall of Fame is a pretty cool looking building.The corporate headquarters are just a block away.

This is the car that Jimmie Johnson won one of his championships with.

The Hall of Fame was actually really fun for all of us. It was very interactive. You got to learn what it is like to work in all the different areas of the sport. They had activities to simulate the driver, pit crew, mechanics, and broadcasters. They also had a replica of the transport trucks they use for the cars that you could walk around. 

4 Straight! These are Jimmie Johnson's trophys that he won the last 4 years. He is the only driver in NASCAR history to win the title 4 years in row. He is close this year, maybe it will be 5!

When we were done there we grabbed some lunch and then headed to the race track. There were tons of people there and lots of stuff to look at. There were all kinds of vendors giving away samples. Each driver had a big semi trailer there that they were selling merchandise out of. Let me just say, there are some NASCAR fans that will spend their whole life savings (it seemed like!) on their driver. I couldn't believe how much money people were spending. Anyway, we found the stand where they were selling Pit Passes. $100 - EACH! We talked to the people and they all but told us it was a waste of money because you don't really get to see the drivers unless you stalk them at the bathroom and the cars are kept away from the public too. Jared was totally bummed. That was what he had been looking forward too, seeing Jimmie and getting his picture taken with the car. We wondered some more and found out that the next best thing was available. Jimmie would be doing an interview for a radio station in a couple hours and they were letting people watch. We stood in our spots for over an hour, but we had a great view. There were only about 3 people in front of us.

We had really good seats. You can see the Start/Finish line wasn't too far down from us and we were straight across from Pit Road.

When we were taking this picture, Lisa had here head tilted weird. So I told her not to do that cause she had a double chin with her head like that and that she wouldn't want that for the picture. Right as I was saying that, I look up and there is a guy sitting right behind her about 2 rows up with a major double chin. He says to me "yeah, tell me about it." It was pretty funny.

Check out our friend behind us who decided to join us in our picture.

Jimmie Johnson's crew.

One of the things that we enjoy about Lisa and Evan is that they like to people-watch as much as we do. The 4 of us could make fun of people for hours and we learned this trip that a race is a great place to do this. This guy served as our entertainment for the evening. He would stand up and toast his driver, Mark Martin, every time his car would go around. They did over 300 laps that night so this guy did a lot of standing up! The problem got to be that after he had drank a number of those beers he couldn't stand up anymore. There were like 4 guys behind him that would stand up with him, making fun of him, for quite a few laps. It was pretty hilarious!

Kevin Harvick's crew.

Jamie McMurray ended up winning the race. Jimmie came in 3rd, I think. It was a long day (we left the track at about midnight and then drove 3 hours back to the house), but we had a blast!

I'm so glad that Jared finally got to go to a race and we had so much fun with Lisa and Evan.