Val’s First Race
This past weekend was Val’s first Pocono Race Weekend experience and as always, a good time had by all. We headed up to my folks place late Saturday afternoon after making sure the kids were squared away. Joe & Nat and the boys were up there as well as my parents and Doug, soon to be joined by our friends from Ohio, Ray & Shana. After a good dinner of dogs, burgers, roast pork, salad, fruit and pretty much anything else you can think of we settled into the basement to catch up and BS. The Nationwide race had started so that served as early evening background noise.
Lou joined us not long after we’d settled in and added those evil Virginia peanuts to the mix, along with his sterling conversation of course. He really let his hair down and had a personal best of FOUR beers! Kyle Busch won the Nationwide race but we missed his now-controversial guitar smashing celebration by turning over to the IRL Texas race. We had dragged along an Xbox and the Rock Band instruments, but nobody ever seemed to have motivation enough to move off the sofas so we never did play.
Sunday dawned an hour later than Val & I thought it did as the clock in the bedroom we were using was an hour behind. We headed over to the track around 11:30 with Ray& Shana, Joe & Lou were waiting on Billy & Bono to arrive in Billy’s truck, as well as for Mike Martin. Billy had a delivery to make Monday early AM at the NY state border so our dad did some calling around and was able to wrangle him a spot to park his rig behind the small shopping center just up the road from the house. We all wound up getting to the track at the same time as using the “back way” proved worthless this year. We have always parked in the big grass lots just across the street from the track but they weren’t in use this year and so we had to slug our way sitting in traffic to get into one of the lots at the front of the track. I called Joe and was able to spare him that.
Unfortunately the delay didn’t leave us any time to head over to pit road, but we did head into the fan zone area and Val got herself her first NASCAR swag, a #20 visor and a matchbox-size (1/64) #20 car. She thinks Joey is so CUTE!

