Another Great Adventure – Indy Racing

A few weeks ago we were just bidding time until work begins at the end of September when I received an email from Auto Club Speedway about an upcoming event, the MAVTV 500 INDYCAR Race.  Being almost a week before it began we didn’t think we could get any camping or tickets, but we soon realized that this event was not NASCAR!

We were able to get front row infield camping on turn 3 with two wristbands for $345 including all taxes and fees.  We jumped at the chance for us to enjoy our first live Indy race together.  Jerry had never gone to one and the last one I attended was through the streets of downtown Detroit which they have not been racing there in many years.

We arrived at noon on Thursday to stage for entry to the infield at 3pm…they were late getting us in but we were finally situated by 5pm.  Of course we chose the weekend there was to be record breaking temperatures in the area and they were not wrong.  The 3 days we were there, the highs were over 105 degrees and the lows at night barely dipped out of the 80’s.  Needless to say it was warm.  We kept cool as possible with plenty of ice, water spray and plenty of drinking water. 

The race was a night race and it was so exciting under the lights, and to be right next to the track was awesome.  

We were lucky enough to be camped next to a wonderful man who was an Indy fan that caught us up on who is who and how they were scoring for the final championship race.  He was 71 years old, lived in our old neighborhood in Phoenix and was just a joy to hang out with.  He lost his wife about 5 years ago and even though he is dating another lovely lady, you could still see that he still missed his lovely wife of over 40 years every time he spoke about her.

Our other neighbor, unfortunately, we did not get to know him until the day after the night he ran his generator ALL NIGHT!  He came over the next day before we had a chance to go over and talk to them about it and he asked if he had been a bad neighbor and we agreed he had been.  He assumed since it was so warm that most people would run theirs all night which we did not.  Of course we could have gone over there at 3am but I did not want to bother him…yes, you heard me right, I can be so annoying at times.  Instead, I stayed up and worried about all those stories we have read about couples dying from the fumes.  Because of the heat all of our windows were open and we are not sure whether that is good or not.  Oh yea, forgot to mention that by this time I woke up Jerry who was sound asleep which scared me because I thought he had rendered to the fumes.  No alarms of ours went off but how certain was I that they were all working correctly.  Or that even though our neighbor had just bought an exhaust pipe that Jerry assisted installing, how certain we were that the pipe was taking the fumes away and not winding right back into our open windows?  Finally after 4am I was too tired to sleep outside anymore and the body was aching so we just threw caution to the wind and decided if we were going to die, we would go together in our RV…what a way to go!

Even with the heat and the one night of the fume fear, we had a great time and are now thinking that we will be checking out more opportunities to be at the tracks besides just NASCAR.

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