The Rest of Nascar Weekend

So, I am sure that you have been hanging by the seat of your pants wondering what was so wonderful about our Nascar weekend. Well, here is the thing.... everything was wonderful about the weekend. I loved it. I had so much fun with our friends and I did a lot of laughing.


Saturday morning we got up and headed out to visit all of the race shops. We started at Penske and although the store wasn't loaded with goods we were able to get into the garage (via a upper level walkway) so we could see what goes on very well. The only draw back to visiting these places on Saturday before race day is that not much was going on. I was really amazed at how clean it was. When I think of garages and working on cars, I think oil, grease, not very clean. This place sparkled.

After Penske we went to Joe Gibbs racing (home of Tony Stewart, Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin and Joey Logano) then on to Hendrick Motorsports (home of Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhart Jr. and Casey Mears). Hendrick was part Nascar superstore and part museum. I loved visiting all the shops, but Hendrick was definately the better shop to visit.

We were able to squeeze ourselves into a racing seat (those guys obviously don't have any thighs).

As I said before the Hendrick store had a bit of a museum running through it. We saw lots of stuff including....

Jimmie Johnson's Daytona winning car. I love that it still has the confetti stuck to the paint. Very authentic!!

And, "The Claw" that is used to make sure all the new cars are built to the same specifications. Altering the shape of the car can influence the speed by causing downforce or more aerodynamics. This is used to keep everyone on an even playing field (when it comes to the building of the car anyway).

We also had a quick (and very funny) pitstop at Sonic for some lunch. I must say I had the biggest burger I've ever had at a fast food restaurant. Thank you Rachel for suggesting it.

After all the garage fun we decided to go off to a movie. We saw Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. I loved it. I am a big fan of the funny action adventure with a little romance thrown in kind of movies. I thought that it kept well with Harrison Ford's age and didn't try to turn him into another over the hill action star. I laughed out loud several times.

After the movie we were still trying to kill time (we really didn't want to spend any more time than we had to at our hotel) so we went into a Bass Pro Shops for a little while. I found a hat that I really liked and I should have bought, but didn't. Then we noticed that the Bass Pro Shop was attached to a HUGE mall. We went for a short walk around the mall and I ended up buying two pair of shoes, the guys went go-cart racing and we had a late dinner at Chili's. 5 1/2 hours later we practically ran back to our car so that we wouldn't be locked in. There was a lot of laughing over that too. I did a lot of laughing.