Bristol

Bristol is one of the most unique raceways on the Nascar Circuit. It's a 1/2 mile track (short) and it's built into a 'stadium' style setting. Most racetracks have various levels of 'grandstands' around the track with many areas of the track not having seating at all. Bristol is more like a large football stadium. In fact, it has been considered seriously in the last decade to sod the infield and host a Tennessee/Virginia football game. This plan never came to pass, but if it had, it would be the largest seating capacity football arena in the country - at 160,000.

With 160,000 people crowded into the place during the saturday night race, and with the design of the stadium being much like a large oval wok, this is the noisiest raceway in Nascar.

Fay's coming.

We spent the day getting ready for Fay to come and visit. Fay is currently a tropical storm and projected to barely become a class 1 hurricane as it's forecasted track brings it onshore around Ft. Meyers (the SW corner of the state). At this moment, it's projected to be on the western edge of our county on Wednesday early a.m. It's forecasted to be around 45 mph at the time. The wind in general shouldn't be a big event - although we would be in the worst quadrant for tornados (Jan's biggest fear in the world).
I leave at noon on tuesday, so I'll pretty much miss the main event, but we've gotten the house stocked up with everything that Jan & Gracie should need.

Today, I finished getting the boat prepared for hurricane season by taking down all the canvas, lashing the main sail cover and removing the foresail. I also doubled up all the dock lines and pulled the hull further away from the dock. You can see the difference in the 2 photos below:

This Area is Beautiful

This being my first trip to Watkins Glen for a race, I was quite surprised at how beautiful the area is. Rolling green hills, lovely clouds and some pretty friendly people as well. This race is a road course, so the set-up is different from most of the races we do. You can't see the whole track from anywhere on the grounds.





When we left the track on wednesday, our EIC (truck engineer) Mike took myself and Jack to a nearby town to show us this waterfall that lands right in someone's backyard. It's kinda cool.


After that, Mike said "I've just got to show you this bar - located in a local lodge". We went in and there were hundreds of arrows shot into the wall above the bar. It turns out that the lodge has sponsored archery contests for many years and the winners of each division get to come in and shoot an arrow into the wall above the bar - kinda 'leaving their mark'. It's fun to see interesting local stuff like this when we travel.

Soaring Museum in Elmira NY

I'm currently in staying in Ithaca New York while doing the Watkins Glen race this weekend. I flew into Elmira NY on tuesday. Elmira is the home of the Soaring Museum of America. When I got off the plane, I made my way to my rental car and headed up Harris Hill to the museum. It was a fun tour - a bit smaller than I would have thought, but still very well done.





They had one hang glider (sort of) on display. It's an original Rogallo style wing without much of the frame. The original hang gliders had lots of 'billow' in the wing while flying and the one on display had the leading edges widened out to make the fabric tight - so it wasn't very representative of any style hang glider.