Bank of America 500

Randy came to Raleigh last week-end to accompany me to the race at Lowes Motor Speedway.  He flew in late Friday night and stayed until early Monday morning.  We left home at 10am on Saturday morning and got there around 1pm.  Found a parking spot fairly quickly and started perusing the team haulers.  Got to see David Gilliland signing autographs and bought some stuff for Sue and the girls.

Piker arrived shortly after 4 and joined us for a few cocktails.  Then we made our way into the track around 5:30 and got to see driver intros.  Couldn’t have had better seats.  About 100 yards from the start/finish line about half way up right next to the exit ramp.  What was even better was that the men’s room was right there too.  Too good to be true… J

The race was very exciting.  What amazed me most was how fast they went into turn 1.  Seemed like they dived in there so fast that they would end up in the wall every time.  My favorite driver, Jimmy Johnson, led pretty much the entire first half of the race but got shuffled into the pack when they decided to take 4 tires and many of the other drivers only took 2.  Then Jimmy spun out trying to make his way back to the front and suffered minor rear-end damage.  He managed to get back to 7^th before having a vapor lock issue on a restart with 5 laps to go.  Ended up 14^th (I think) and lost a lot of ground to the race winner, Jeff Gordon.

We planned to spend the night at the track but Piker missed his shuttle (we convinced him to hang with us for a while after the race so it’s definitely our fault) so we drove to his house at 2am and crashed there.  Felt bad leaving so early in the morning but I wanted Randy to have some time with the girls.  We made it home by 12:30 and Erin LOVED her hat.  Helped a lot since M&M’s sponsors the #38 car.  So she’s #38 and I’m #48…

All in all it was a great trip and I’m so happy to have made it.  I really  hope to make it to some races next year – we’ll just have to wait and see.  Here are some pics from the week-end (http://picasaweb.google.com/djhunt77/Randy_Visit).

Emerald Isle vacation

Last week we were on vacation in Emerald Isle, NC.  This was our fourth year at the same condo.  The weather was great and the girls had a blast.  We go to go fishing (caught one bluefish and gave it to the local fishing next to us), fly Erin’s kite, spend some time in the pool, went to the aquarium, and of course spent lots of time on the beach.  The weather was great with one exception – the morning I had to pack the truck.  Ugh.  The girls had a hard time sleeping at the condo, particularly Caitlin.  Her eczema seems to be getting now that we’ve been home for a few days.  Molly had a great time too – at least 3 walks per day.  Our neighbor Gary watched Dozer while we were gone.  Dozer has been very happy to see us as he is constantly meowing at us.  He only did one bad thing – he knocked over a picture frame on the mantel.  Definitely could have been a lot worse.  The hose bib on the shed decided to spring a leak so I’m fixing that today.  That area of the yard was soaked so not sure how long it was leaking.

Naturally we took some digital pictures (http://picasaweb.google.com/djhunt77/Emerald_Isle_Sep_07) and shot some video.  Hopefully I’ll have time to scan Sue’s hard copy prints and update the web album.  I started to move our home movies to DVD – it’s quite time consuming so no idea when the library will be “up to date”.

Tomorrow I return to work.  Hopefully no surprises are waiting for me – we’ve had a lot of turmoil recently with the new executive leadership.  I’m not expecting anything since the reorg is over and my team has just started working on our next set of projects.  We’ll see…