NASCAR All Star Challenge

When NASCAR comes to Charlotte...I mean Lowe's... Motor Speedway for it's two week stop for the NASCAR All Star race and the Memorial Day classic, Coke 600, you can bet that I will be there for all or part of the festivities.



A majority of the time you will find me roaming the pits, camera in tow, chasing down pissy NASCAR drivers while trying to get a bit of sound here and there to make my next NASCAR story my best yet.



This past weekend was the NEXTEL All Star Challenge. I didn't work, I took the family.



Let me stop right here for a quick expainer though... I was planning on taking my WHOLE family, that is, my two sons, my two stepsons, my stepdaughter and my wife but due to the death of my sons' step-grandfather, they couldn't go with us.



And my younger stepson opted out for a long anticipated sleepover at one of his friend's.



So instead of seven of us piling into the Caravan, it was just the four of us.



Jeffrey and I spent most of our time at the fence, snapping photos and booing each others favorited drivers.(The bum likes Jeff Gordon for Pete's sake!)



Jeffrey made me take like a gazillion pictures of him until I had Gordon in the piture behind him. That's not easy when they are goint 200 MPH!(and you can't even tell it's Jeff Gordon, way out of first place, by the way.)



But then Tony Stewart decided he wanted to start another feud between Kevin Harvick and Joe Nemecheck and the ensuing red flag period gave us an opportunity to pose in front of the motionless cars that had stopped up on the high banked track.



Kaitlynn is my littlest NASCAR fan. She's picking it up really early...although I don't think the finger she's giving is intentional, so I hope she doesn't get called to the oval office(NASCAR equivalent of visiting with the principal).



After the red flag a group of nice people invited us up onto their school bus. Yes I said school bus, this is no euphamism.



They paid $800 for it at an Auction and spent more than that building a viewing deck onto the top of the High Point, NC built child mover. Due to a blown head gasket, the bus is only good for 5 miles at a time, so it's a good thing that the owner of the bus only lives 5 miles from the track!



But the view was great and that is what really matters.



You can see clear to the front side of the track with just a short section that is out of view.



I'm going to have to find myself one of these buses.(that's probably a joke)

The traffic going home wasn't. This was the picture at 11:30 AND Midnight!