NASCAR at Atlanta (8/30-31)

I can't believe August is almost over.  Where has time gone!!!!!  We are enjoying ourselves at Stone Mountain out of Atlanta.  Today we didn't know what we wanted to do.  I think we have been on the go so much it is kind a catching up with us.  We decided to go visit on of the civil war sites.  We were hoping to go to the  Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park.  We stopped in Marietta for lunch at Crystal Burger, very similar it White Castle, but in our opinion better.  As a kid Joe used to eat at Crystal burger in Huntsville all the time.  We used to go there every time we would go back for Christmas.  They still are very tasty. Now the problems begin As usual we are a little lost.  The street signs in this part of the country are not very good.  We would manage to find a sigh to say we were entering the park an then a block away there would be a sigh saying we are leaving the park.  We were trying to find the visitor center, followed the signs but never found it.  After about an hour of this we decided it wasn't worth the aggravation we were beginning to feel so we came back to the RV park and had dinner and watched a movie.

Ok now it is Sunday and NASCAR is racing at Atlanta Speedway.  We weren't sure we wanted to go or not.  The weather looked good and tickets were still available so we bought two on the back stretch by turn 3.  For once we were able to find the track with no trouble.  Joe has been here before but it has all changed.  Once parked with thousands of other people, we made our way to our seats.  These actually turned out to be good seats.  You could pretty much see the whole track.  The big problem is this is a super speedway, 1.5 miles.  It is big and fast.  I found it very hard to keep track of my favorite drivers.  


When driver introductions were done the whole of the front and back stretch stood up and cheered for Tony Stewart, all happy to have him back.  I believe Dale Jr got the next biggest reception.  Everyone started cheering for him as soon as they showed his car they didn't even wait for his name to be announced.One of the main reasons we decided to attend this race is because Tony Stewart was back in his car after missing several races.  We really missed his not being at Bristol.  So I wore my Dale Jr shirt and bought a Tony Stewart hat.  Now I am covered for all my favorite drivers.  Tony was doing really good at the first of the race, but then he got put into the wall and ended up call it a day.

Kevin Harvick was doing really good and had lead a lot of the race.  Then Casey Kane got the lead and was battling with Kevin when the yellow came out.  So it would be a green, white, checker finish. I hate it when this happens, it always unscrews everyone's heads and then there are more yellows.  That is what happened this time time the green came out and the 27 of  Paul Menard went up into Kevin and put him into the wall and really tore his car up pretty bad.  Casey Kane restarted up front and managed to pull of his first win for this year.  I like Casey so I was happy for him.  Dale Jr ended up 11th and Kyle Larson was 8th.  Jeff Gordon crashed early on and finished two laps down.

We waited for some of the crowd to clear out before heading back to the truck.  It really felt good to walk after sitting for about 5 hours.  It was 12:25 when we pulled out of our parking space just to be greeted by an huge unmoving line of cars.  We sat for about 5 minutes when Joe decided to go around them and out the other way.  At least the cars were moving over there. Once we got out of the mess and on the freeway we were home by 1:30, not bad!!!!!
Our next big race will be Richmond in Sept.