Thursday, September 08, 2011

A day at Atlanta Motor Speedway

Over Labor Day weekend, DJ and I, and then Natalie and I were lucky enough, blessed enough to be able to have a once in a life time chance to go to the NASCAR races in Atlanta. I am sure I know what you are thinking..... Hello Patty, once in a life time? not so much.... But really it was, you see, for 3 days worth of fun, I only spent $170 or so, and that includes hotel on Friday night. :-) See it all started a few weeks ago when I guessed on Twitter who would win the Michigan race with Kyle Busch. So AMS gave me a garage tour for two, all I had to do was get tickets to the Nationwide race. Easy decision, DJ was free. Then AMS had on their Facebook page a contest with Papa John's Pizza. So I entered it, all it said was hula hoop with Papa John or something like that. Last week I got an email saying that I had won two tickets through that, score take Natalie. Over the week prior to the races, I tweeted one of the guys from Speed TV and asked what days he was going to be at the track. I was disappointed when he said only on Thursday and Friday, since that was the days I wouldn't be there. (It's neat to get to meet people in real life that you know through social media). Well Friday when I was at work he sent me a message saying that he had 2 tickets to the truck race and did I want them. Of course I did. So I booked a last minute hotel up close to the track and DJ and I hopped in the truck and were off. We met up with Mr. Sammy thanked him profusely and watched some great truck racing. Saturday we were back at the track early in the morning to watch Speed film Trackside (and yes we were on the show during one of the fan shots, I was tweeting, go figure). Then it was off on our garage tour! Talk about neat. The tour guides (track ambassadors) were wonderful, the people of NASCAR were wonderful. If DJ had a question they did their best to answer it, if a crew member heard the question they answered it. Morgan Shepard and his wife talked to DJ and signed his hero card. Dale Jr, Carl Edwards and Scott Speed all waved to him as we were standing in front of the media center as they were driving back out to practice. The only minor hiccup came in the form of not having the right credentials for DJ to go into the Cup garage, but that was sorted easily enough. And goodness knows everyone apologized about 50 times for that being a hassle.
Sunday Natalie and I headed back to the track for the day, the race ended up being rained out, but trust me we were not disappointed in our day!
So our day started on Sunday by participating in the Papa John's contest.... anything for free tickets
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Then we hung out at the Coke stage to listen to Lenard Skynard talk
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We headed to the Tweetup, thats @jeff_gluck in the background and @amsupdates Brad Harrison in the foreground
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Miss Sprint Cup came and brought a special guest
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Then we headed back to the garage.... OMG
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