road trip Archives

Luckily I didn’t encounter Jason at Camp Crystal Lake so on a day that could have spelt disaster (d-i-s-a-s-t-e-r there, that spells disaster), the superstitions of Friday the 13th failed to hit. I did have a near miss at the ticket collection window at Daytona when I went to collect my ticket which they had previously assured my that they hadn’t posted to me, when they checked and couldn’t find it they decided they had posted it, so they had to print another one off for me, so all was fine.

After a morning of pootling around I decided to head for Daytona just after 2, fortunately the hotel I’d booked was ideally placed for getting to Daytona, literally one turn and then onto the interstate and then head in the direction of Daytona for 40 miles. The biggest problem with doing the journey solo is that you have to read the directions whilst doing (ahem) 70 in the outside lane, which meant I missed the suggested route into the circuit, but I knew that I was still heading in roughly the right direction, and in the end I reckon I had a smoother journey in than most.

Being a veteran of motor racing, I was a little surprised at the set-up for the parking but I reckon it worked. Basically the general parking was about 2-3 miles from the circuit and they’d opened up a cross country dirt-track route for courtesy buses to take to avoid the traffic. Fine except the drop off point was still about a ¼ of a mile from the circuit on the other side of a 4 lane highway, so we had to trudge our way over the bridge.

Daytona is big, but then for a 2.5 mile tri-oval what do you expect? I found the ticket collection window, ¼ of a mile in the wrong direction from my seat, I found my seat (after over shooting and climbing too many stairs for my liking) and I found the merchandising area another ¼ of a mile past the ticket collection window, so did a fair bit of walking, but I guess that’s not a bad thing.

The one thing I hadn’t properly accounted for was the drop in temperature when it got dark. The race itself didn’t start until 8 pm, so when I left for the race in the afternoon it was in the mid 20s and t-shirt weather, by 8 o’clock it wasn’t. Fortunately there were a lot of people in the stands and we were a bit crammed in, and the girl next to me had a fleece so at least my left arm was slightly warmer.

The race itself was pretty spectacular, two major incidents and some extremely close racing with both the first two finishers having fought their way through the field to get to the front.

The journey back was a lot smoother than expected, after using some pretty impressive drafting and overtaking manoeuvres to get back to the bus queue and spotting a new line opening up just as I got there, I must have been in the first set of buses to get back to the car park. As the numbers of people getting back to the car park was regulated the queues to get out were non-existent so was back at the hotel within an hour of getting on the bus, which compared to most motor racing events is a minor miracle.

When I got back Rag had arrived so we had a chat and we bought some beers for him and toasted the journey to come.

Today is another chilled start with the fun to come later when the final two arrive and I have the task of trying to get a bigger vehicle.

Seeing as my hotel room has a fridge in it and I was going to be staying for a few days I decided to venture out and get some supplies. Strange things American supermarkets, 4 billion sq ft in size, 2 aisles of grocery items.

So I bought my self some spread (they don’t call it margarine here) and some rolls and some processed cheese. To say it’s processed is an understatement, since when have you ever since cheese with a 9 month shelf life. Of course, the spread is white, in the UK we must add something to turn it yellow to at least make it look like butter, in fact I can’t believe the stuff they call I can’t believe it’s not butter, is in fact not butter and the stuff they call I can’t believe it’s not I can’t believe it’s not butter is also in fact not butter (spot the TV reference folks).

Of course what I forgot to do was steal any of the plastic cutlery from the breakfasst room, so here I am spreading spread with my fingers onto my buns for the cheese to follow.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Not that I know anyone called Emma, and even if I did I wouldn’t call from here, think of the cost! (sorry it’s the law, at least one bad pun per post)

Quandary number one is all about this, blogging, how much to blog. I am already conscious that I’m saying too much (especially after my constipation thread) but then isn’t that the point? I guess it’s getting the balance between verbal, sorry textual diarrhoea and not saying anything informative. I don’t want these entries to become Twitter like and have me enter every two minutes “I’m in a queue”, “I’m still in a queue”, or “I’m glowing”, followed by “I’m gently perspiring” to “I’m sweating buckets here, where’s the nearest shower?” And although I also use Facebook, I don’t want this to be an extension of the status updates, although strictly speaking my status update on Facebook should always read “Owen is updating his Facebook status”. Then if you are on both Facebook and Twitter, you end up in an endless loop stating that you are either just updating itself or the other. See textual diarrhoea.

Onto the real dilemma, who to support in the race this weekend. Following up on Rag’s question last week, will he forget something, well I did, I own two NASCAR related baseball caps (not something to be proud of as a UK resident, but fortunately I’ve not been out in the sun long enough to turn my neck the requisite colour yet) but I left them both behind. So I need to decide who to support so as i can buy the correct baseball cap. With the list of 40+ drivers you’d have thought that it would be easy to pick someone out, but as I’ve only heard of one of them, Juan Pablo Montoya, and Rag has already bagged him, it’s not so easy. I thought about going on numbers, but Montoya drives the 42 car, so that is out of the window, so it comes down to glory hunting. I could pick the three time champion Jimmie Johnson in the 48 car, but that’d be like picking Man Utd. I could pick Carl Edwards in the 99 car, he always comes across as genuine in interviews, and did a good job when he came over to Wembley last December for the race of champions. But at the moment I’m being swayed to Kyle Busch, he’s from Las Vegas, my spiritual home, he takes risks and won a load of races at the start of the season only to fade away towards the end, very much like my beloved Liverpool. Plus he is sponsored by M&Ms, so it can’t be bad.

It’s an early blog today as the jet lag has kicked in and I can’t force myself to sleep any more. It’ll be a nice leisurely day before I head off in the afternoon. After doing some research, the pick up race doesn’t start until 8 pm here, so I doubt that I’ll be back in the hotel until the early hours which means I ought to try and nap around lunch time. So I’m going to leave it at that for now, leave you to ponder both dilemmas and tell me whether to shut up and stop writing so much and whether I should be a Bush man or not.

I don't know what it is about long haul flights but they don't half make you constipated. Good news is that I've checked and we've got an all clear.

However talk about coming back down to earth with a bump, let's just say my experiences after landing in Orlando were less than upper class.

Before I go into that, let me tell you, you've got to try upper class at least once in your life, jeez, food you can eat, served on proper crockery with metal cutlery, none of this plastic trays and plastic forks and plastic food business. Plus the leg room and the fact that they take time to learn your name, ok so there were only the 14 of us in upper class, but it's a nice touch.

I do have a couple of disadvantages being a lone traveller and a shy one at that, I rarely get engaged in conversations with anyone. Obviously it's easier if you are in a couple as you can talk to other couples. Anyway, I have to make do with listening in on other people's conversations to get my entertainment. Funnily the guy behind me came up with a corker of a Freudian slip, he was in upper but his travelling companion was in economy, he referred to her first as his girlfriend and then quickly corrected himself and said daughter. I think he was on the level and it was his daughter, but that's one hell of a Freudian slip. (And yes Dan, you would have)

Anyway, the flight itself was uneventful, just 9 hours of tedium interrupted by food. It was when we landed at Orlando that the problems begin. It didn’t help that it was 28 degrees and humid out when we landed, always makes for frayed tempers. So we pull up to the gate, get up and head for the door and nothing happens. I look out of the window and there’s the sky bridge thing, not quite bridging across the sky. It was stuck, a guy comes out with a hammer and taps a few things and it starts to move up and down but not forwards towards the plane. Another guy comes out and takes a look and shakes his head, it was only when the third guy came along and kicked something did it jerk into life and connect up, for a short while I thought we were going to have to jump for it. That was a nice 15 minutes standing in a humid plane when the last place you wanted to be was on a plane.

Next came my favourite part of travel to the US, immigration, made worse by the two groups in front of me being extended families, it took bloody ages in the non air-conditioned immigration hall to clear. Fine I thought, not knowing the set-up at Orlando, I quickly grab a trolley and identify my bags (another advantage of upper class, a separate conveyor belt) head through customs only to be greeted by a set of escalators and a couple of old Doris’s telling you that trolleys stopped there. Apparently we were in terminal B and the baggage pick up was in terminal A, so I had to dump them on another conveyor belt and wave them goodbye whilst I got the unmanned train to the main terminal.

After searching for 10 minutes to find the right carousel (fortunately near the car hire desks) another 10 minute delay whilst I waited for a second time for my bags. By this stage I’m pissed off, tired and gently perspiring. So I queue for the car hire, and I queue and I queue. I had enough time to switch on the blackberry and wade through all of my e-mails and then some before getting served. Of course they didn’t have the car I’d booked and tried fobbing my off with something much smaller to which I pointed out that there’d be 4 adults with luggage to last all 4 adults for nearly 3 weeks and I’d need something bigger. So the guy calls up and arranges a Chevy Aspen which he told me was much bigger. Well it was, it had a step to get up into the drivers seat. The only problem was that there wasn’t enough room in the back for my luggage let alone that of anyone else’s, my case ended up on the back row (of three rows) of seats. The car is perfect if you’ve a family of two parents and 5 kids and are just heading to Disney, it’s not going to suffice for four big blokes for 3 weeks doing a road trip. Plus it has a 5.7 litre engine which will be a tad thirsty methinks. So I am discounting this vehicle as the Muppet-mobile or the mystery wagon depending on what we decide to call it. I don’t think we can call it the mystery machine only because I wouldn’t like to assign the four characters out of Scooby-Doo (excluding the dog) to the four of us, so the muppet-mobile will have to suffice for now. I’m hoping that when I pick up John and Ivan and add them onto the car hire, we can exchange for something more suitable.

To top that I had the fun task of trying to find the hotel from the airport with no map and only a two line description of how to get there. Amazingly I managed it, otherwise from reading the first line of this entry I may be faced with an unwanted cleaning bill.

I can say that the hotel is not the best I’ve stayed in, but not the worst either, and the reviews on trip-advisor were a little harsh, however I did turn up at night and things could look very different in the morning.

Plans are for an early night, breakfast and shopping in the morning. A polite conversation with the rental company and then a mission to Daytona to see if my ticket for the trucks really is at the pick up window, if so an evening of motor racing is on the cards, by which time intrepid traveller number 2, Rag himself will have arrived on scene.

Happy reading.

I don't think we can really say the road trip has started officially until the 4 muppetteers are united, in fact I am the first intrepid traveller to commence their journey.

So here I am sitting in the Clubhouse at Gatwick airport having polished off my second free bacon sarnie contemplating the fact that I am about to become an ambi-turner. If you've not seen the film Zoolander I recommend it, however the title character was a male model who an inability to turn left, and until today I also had the same problem when it came to boarding aircraft. Not an inability as such just never had the permission to turn left.

Well among many firsts on this trip, it'll be my first in Upper Class. I have to thank Virgin for reducing the flight costs by 70% to make this possible, but possible it is.

I guess the next chance to blog will probaly once I've checked in tonight having picked up the muppet-mobile.

Happy days - oh no that's a completely different TV show and I don't think any of the four of us fit the Fonz bill.