Last night was a little warmer than the night before. Buying
those fleece blankets certainly helped. Now this is camping. Not like the
camping we did in the first leg where we had access to bathrooms and showers.
This is port-o-potty camping. Right outside the campground was a lady selling
showers and after 2 days of baby wipes me, Devin, & Cassie went and took
showers. For $5 it was the best shower ever. Hot water and no time limit. The
lady running it was a disabled Marine too.
After our showers Cassie made scrambled eggs & sausage
and we quickly packed up and headed to the race. We decided to pack up camp
after the race since there was no point to rush off only to sit in traffic. We
had Pit Road passes, allowing you to go down on the track and Pit Road just
before the race. I was super excited.
Here is me with Carl Edwards’ car:
And in the #99 pit box:
Dream-come-true. We saw some other drivers’ cars and pit
boxes but none of them matter.
Okay, okay, here is Devin with the #24:
Him & Dustin in the #24 pit box:
And Mini-B on the track (he was tired and wanted to lay
down):
Mini-B on the wall:
When we got to our seat I was pleasantly surprised to find
we were sitting directly in front of Carl’s pit box. See? I’m a big fan.
It was SUPER cold. Windy, drizzly, and cold:
Okay, so Carl hasn’t exactly had a stellar year, and it was
only 16 laps in that he got wrecked. So I got to watch the many times he
stopped to try and repair his car. And he was easy to spot on the track because
he was so far behind the pack…
The race was pretty average until the very last lap when, on
turn four, the leader tried to block and a 25 car pile-up ensued. Few cars made
it out and crossed the finish line. Some made it out but crossed the finish
line on fire (we’re talking engulfed in flames). Jimmie Johnson had to hitch a
ride back to the garage on Dale Jr’s car. The aftermath was just as
entertaining as the wreck itself.
We shuffled through the crowd back to our campsite with only
one almost incident because some guy thought it necessary to attempt to run
over the pedestrian girl in front of us because he wanted to cut in front of
the 3 lanes of exiting traffic. I said a few choice words but he must’ve known
better because he didn’t stop. He really ran up on this girl who was walking
just a few feet ahead of us in the pedestrian lane. I was really aggravated. We
came back to camp and quickly packed up, said our goodbyes to Dustin &
Cassie, and thanked the others around us for a good first ‘Dega experience. They invited us to camp around them anytime we come back. Here’s us, all packed
up:
And our camp area after most of it was torn down; more than
half the people had already left:
Getting out wasn’t as bad as we had expected. We did hit
some heavy traffic getting out of the Superspeedway area but the further we got
on the interstate the more it broke up. By the time we went through Birmingham
it was pretty sparse.
We decided to drive through the night to go home. We wanted
to stop and sleep in our own bed, drop off a lot of things, do some laundry…ya
know, the typical stuff…rather than trying to go straight out to the Grand
Canyon (our next big stop).
When we finally did make it home we actually grabbed the
mileage. For this part of leg two, eleven days, we went 2986.9 miles for a
grand total of 13,211.6 miles across America.
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