Weekend in Charlotte, NC

You can see all of my photos from our race weekend here.

Our neighbor, Tim, had two extra tickets to the Coca-Cola 600, so we piled in the truck with him and his brother, Jack, for a Memorial Day-weekend in Charlotte.  We left our house around 8am on Friday morning (May 22nd) and stopped for breakfast in New Market, VA at a little mom & pop restaurant.  Saltiest country ham I’ve ever had in my life.  Tim and Jack call it “heart attack ham” and can’t get enough of it.  It was a long drive, but we made it around 5pm or so.  We checked in at the hotel then headed the next exit up to J&R because Jack wanted to buy some cigars for a friend’s birthday.  That place is HUGE.  After cigar shopping we went to Sagebrush for dinner.  Sagebrush was pretty decent when we were there with Tim and our friend Brian back in the fall of 2005, but man has that place gone down hill.  There was almost no one in there.  The food was mediocre and the margaritas were seriously watered down.  After dinner we headed back to the hotel for the night.

We got up bright and early on Saturday morning to go visit the Victory Junction Gang Camp and had breakfast at a Cracker Barrel along the way.  Victory Junction is amazing; that’s the only way to describe it.  We got a personal tour, courtesy  of one of the volunteers.  You need to go see it if you’re ever in the area.  After visiting the Victory Junction camp, we weren’t quite sure what to do next.

Welcome Center, patterned after a Sunoco Travel Center

Inside the cabins; every camper gets to take home a handmade teddy bear

Water park with slides, water guns & lazy river

Indoor sports arena donated by Kurt Busch

We all piled in the truck and then someone got the great idea to go find the RCR museum.  I picked up directions in the Victory Junction gift shop; It should be pretty straight-forward, right?  For the most part, it was — until we got to the last two turns.  We spent nearly an hour driving around town getting lost until John stopped and asked a kid for directions.  We got there at 3:15pm, 45 minutes before closing, and weren’t sure if they would even let us in since their sign said that they didn’t sell tickets after 3pm.  But they did.  The four of us cruised through looking at everything mostly individually.  Tim and Jack were way ahead of me, and John was well behind me until I got to Richard Childress’ collection of mounted game.  Some of the highlights of the museum were Dale Earnhardt’s 1998 Daytona car, still in original condition with the penny glued to the dash, and Clint Boyer’s “crossed the finish line upside down and on fire” car.  And I got a picture of John with one of Jeff Burton’s cars.

Aerodynamic clay model of the 1990 Lumina

Clint Boyer's "upside down on fire" car

John with Jeff Burton's car

We headed back toward Statesville and had dinner at Outback then shopped for burgers and dogs for the cooler before heading back to the hotel.  We watched the Busch … ooops…. Nationwide race with Jack and Tim for a bit before heading back to our room.  I wasn’t going to, but I ended up watching the whole thing before finally turning in.  We were back up bright and early to head down to Charlotte on Sunday for the race.  It was pouring and we had breakfast at another Cracker Barrel.  Cracker Barrel is amzing; no matter where in the country you are, there is one there and the food at all of them is consistently the same.

This is what we woke up to

The rain stopped by the time we got to our parking lot of choice.  We made a quick trip to the souvenier trailers (where it started raining again) before unpacking the truck and putting up the tent.  We hung out under the tent reading, napping and crosstitching (LOL) until lunch time when we fired up the two propane grills that we had brought.  We had a feeling that the race was going to get rained out, but at 4pm we headed over to the track anyway.  We sat through all of the pre-race hoopla and it kept raining again.  The track never dried off enough to get things under way.  Around 6pm we left and headed back to the track; MRN was staying that they’d have another update on the weather at 6:30.  By the time we got back to the truck they were reporting that it was rained-out and that they would try to run it the next day.  We headed back to the hotel; I can’t even remember if we had dinner that night or not.  Probably not.

Monday morning we got up bright and early and had breakfast at the Waffle House next door to the hotel, and checked out of our rooms.  We headed back to our favorite parking lot then walked over to the souvenier trailers for one last pass before heading to our seats.  The weather definitely wasn’t looking good.  It rained several times for a total of 6 weather cautions.  Around 5pm we just knew that it wasn’t going to get any better so we all left and headed back to the truck.  The rain was coming down pretty good so we decided to just leave — we had seen 227 laps of racing and Jack needed to be back to work on Tuesday.  Around an hour and a half later while we were eating dinner at Chilis around 60 miles from the track they finally called it.  I’m not sure why they took so long; anyone could see that the rain wasn’t going to stop that last time.

Track entrance

We're going to get soaked and sun burned!

Wow; that sky is really ugly. That's what most of the day looked like.

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically each day to your feed reader.