We went to Daytona for the CocoCola 400 race over the 4th of July holiday. My parents took the RV down, Trey's parents came to Raleigh and drove us to Daytona and we all stayed in the RV in the infield. It was hot but fun and a great time to hang out with both sets of parents!
We stayed in a section right along Lake Lloyd inside the track. Our neighbors won best decorated campsite the last 2 years and really went all out.
Chad kept the dogs for us. Vegas enjoyed looking out his front window.
Thursday we went inside the "FanZone" and got to see the cars going through inspection, take a look at victory lane and watch the cars get worked on in the garages. You can also stand on top of the garages to see pit road and the track.
We then discovered a street party going on just off the beach. It was... interesting!
And on the way home we found hot now donuts!
Friday morning we did the family track walk. The track is 2.5 miles and I was thinking we would be able to stroll around the track at our own pace. While it was a cool thing to do it definitely was not as I expected. There was a "pace truck" with a stage on the back, they threw out t-shirts and had drivers come up to talk, we walked about half a mile behind the truck, turned around and walked back to where we started. It was also crazy to see how steep the track is!
Ryan Newman talking to the crowd!
We also went to the Midway to check out all of the vendors and get free stuff. Since CocoCola is the sponsor they were pushing their new "Share a Coke" campaign and you could type your name in and it would produce a coke with your name on it!
We also got to do a "tour" of the garage area, basically walk around the garages and haulers. They weren't working on the cars in there much because they were already out waiting for qualifying.
Danica Patrick's garage
The pace car
Tires and gas
The viewing area above the garages
Inspection station
We saw Wild Bill from Deadliest Catch
This man served in the war and has also memorized the names and death dates of all of those who have died in Afghanistan and was writing them on the wall
Before the race you are able to go out on track and stand on the start/finish line and even sign your name if you want
Watching the Nationwide race from above the garages
Saturday was rainy pretty much all day. The race ended up getting rained out and delayed to Sunday morning but they still did the fireworks! It was an awesome fireworks show.
Sunday morning the race started and then about 10 laps in had to be delayed because of the rain again!
After the race started again we went in to the Fanzone to watch the race from the top of the garages. We were also able to watch them attempt to fix cars that had already been wrecked.
Jimmie Johnson's car wasn't able to be fixed so they rolled it back to the hauler and put it away
We got back to the RV right as the huge crash in turn 3 was happening, the white vehicle in the picture above was emergency care driving over to the crash with their sirens on.
After the big crash they were under caution then it started to rain again and we needed to beat the traffic since it was already 2:00 and we were going to head home, so we went ahead and left. Turns out they called the race since they were already halfway through. We stopped at Chad's on the way home to pick up the dogs and were very happy to see them even though they had a great time at Chad's.
