Feb 16-Daytona International Speedway, FL

Back to the blog! I flew home to check on Mom’s new hip and left Gene responsible for blogging Savannah and Charleston. Well, he flunks! As soon as I left he got antsy and decided that he wanted to see car racing at Daytona. He spent the whole week I was gone on eBay buying tickets to the Daytona 500. That’s were we are now…parked in the infield of the Daytona International Speedway! Mom’s new hip is just fine. She could get around on her own immediately (using a walker). A nasty bout of pneumonia was the only thing that slowed her down at all. The pneumonia left her with laryngitis, so I had a “quiet” week at home. She couldn’t talk at all—still can’t! More than a week of silence is torture for anyone from the Trenholme clan. I flew back to Gene and left her to fend for herself without a voice—bad daughter! Hopefully she can speak soon! Daytona is amazing. I woke up this morning to a symphony of generators. The entire infield is covered with motorhomes…everything from homemade jobs to an entire mile long row of shiny new Prevost multi-million dollar models. Gene and I have no idea what is going on. Last night there were truck races under the lights. We climbed on top of our rig all dressed in ski clothes. I snuggled into a sleeping bag too. We rented a computer thing from Nextel that shows you the TV camera of the race. You can switch to the cameras inside the cars too. Somehow you can change it to the radio and listen to the individual drivers talking to their pit crews. We listened to them for awhile but couldn’t figure out which driver was talking. For the trucks we just listened to the Nascar station calling the race, and that helped. All we know for sure is that the first one over the finish line wins, and they seem pretty determined to be first! They go about 185 mph and are 2 feet apart at the most—sometimes they are only inches apart. There were 40 or so trucks racing last night, so when they go by its pretty loud. We wear headphones. We are parked in the second row of motorhomes at the end of the 4th turn. We can see the entire 3rd and 4th turns on the track, then watch them on the computer till they come by again. It only takes 43-48 seconds for them to come around! There were lots of crashes last night, which I gather is normal for trucks. Nobody got hurt which is pretty amazing when you see what is left of the trucks after the crashes. As they get wrecked they get towed back to the pits right past us. The drivers are required to take an ambulance ride back to the hospital that’s in the middle of the infield, so they go right past us too. So far so good, because they all just hop out and walk back to the pits! They are about to start practicing for today and will be a 300 mile race in the lesser Busch Series at 2:00 PM. The real Daytona 500 (the Super Bowl of the sport they keep saying) is tomorrow. Hopefully we will have figured out a few cars and their drivers by then!