Off to Bristol

I'm sitting here in the Daytona Beach airport - waiting for my plane to board. It's Wednesday morning and it seems like I just got back from my latest trip to Atlanta. I guess relatively - I did just get back - it was 46 hours ago. I'm really enjoying the job. It's just challenging enough and I like the group of guys that I work with. Some things about the Nascar gig are not quite as good as football - but some things are better.

On the good side:
As you know, commercial air travel is not quite as fun as it used to be. It's much closer to the train system in Europe - where you hurry from one place to another and get crowded into a seat. With this thought in mind - one of the upsides of the Nascar work is that for each travel effort - I'm getting in more work days. Football was 4 paid days and Nascar is 6 paid days. That's a good thing.

The food: In football, they would feed us a 'pre-show' meal because they didn't want the crews leaving on game day and getting stuck away from the venue. In Nascar - beginning on thursday - they will feed us breakfast, lunch and sometimes dinner every day. Also, there's always a large spread of snacks, coffee, softdrinks, gatorade, and water sitting there if you get hungry. Basically, they're trying to make it where we never have to leave the premises. We still get paid our full $50 per day (per diem) anyway. This is cool.

The crew: In football, I was in charge - for good and for bad. I didn't have anyone else on site to 'turn it over to' when something went wrong. I would have a helper, but when I was lead tech - I had (theoretically) the most knowledge about our system - so the pressure was high to get it done. I had a tech support line that I could call for phone help, but still - when things went really bad - I was the person responsible.
In Nascars, there's a large crew and I'm very low on the totem pole as far as expectations of bringing the show to air. There is a part of the job that I'm expected to know very well - and I do - but it's not the 'high anxiety' type of stuff. My largest job is to be one of the 5 guys who sets up the whole network of the show - all the hardware that brings the info into the production truck. It's very important - but it's not 'high anxiety' work. I really like that. I also work the 3D cam -but it's turning out not to be a big deal in regard to pressure.

The Bad parts of Nascar - compared to football - also has a good side to it. It's the schedule. Being gone 6 days at a time - I really miss Jan and home. I put a lot of effort into trying not to think about it and I think that's key to enjoying the job more - but it's still there. The good side of this is that I'll work a couple of weeks on and then have 2+ weeks off. I really like that alot.

Another bad part is that hotels are not generally as nice as the hotels in football. They don't build most racetracks in large population centers and so the hotels are not usually nice or plentiful. I haven't experienced this until this coming week - out hotel is a Holiday Inn Express that's located 33 miles from the track. The experienced crew says this is more normal than not in Nascar.

My plane is about to board - I'll post more later - with photos from Bristol