VIva Las Vegas!

It's weird when you have a work trip over a weekend... it's also weird (at least to me) when a work trip destination is Las Vegas. When two weirds collide you have... my NASCAR weekend in Las Vegas. (NASCAR probably counts as a third weird, but then I would've ended up in a vortex from which there's no escape, and I don't have time or energy for that right now. We'll keep it to two weirds.)

As part of my company's corporate contract with NASCAR, we sponsor a driver and car in return for a lot of brand exposure and all kinds of perks associated with race weekends. Since the sponsorship is also part and parcel to a Kroger partnership, I had the opportunity to spend most of the first weekend in March in Las Vegas, with our Kroger merchants, and attending my first NASCAR race!

No matter how you slice it, the West is a long way away. On the 5am flight out of Appleton, through Chicago, and four hours to Las Vegas, it was a very early Friday - and a tight fit, being in a middle seat on the long haul! I made the most of it, working with uninterrupted time to think and read through materials I hadn't had the luxury of focusing on, so while the guys on either side of me might gotten a couple of inadvertent elbows, I felt quite productive upon stepping off the plane.

Thought it was a work weekend, I try to take advantage of work travel to see friends when possible, and I had scheduled lunch with Leslie before the formal part of the weekend kicked off. I joked that if I was going to be in Las Vegas on my anniversary (Saturday), I could at least have lunch with a bridesmaid the day before my anniversary! We hadn't had much of an opportunity to catch up during the reunion, so it was nice to have some one on one time (well, one on two, including Lena, but she was a very well behaved baby!) and catch up on life and work.

Lunch ended long before I was ready to go, unfortunately, so I headed back to the hotel to meet my coworkers and we headed out on store walks to begin the official working weekend. Saturday morning was meetings and conference calls, with a Saturday afternoon run squeezed in and more work to try and keep up/get ahead, depending on how you look at it. We all went out together on Saturday night, and after a very chilly outdoor dinner (the wind was crazy!!), we spent a fun evening together listening to a great band and doing what passes as dancing for a bunch of 40-somethings. Of course, the beauty of middle age is that you truly don't care what others think of your dancing, so you just let go and live it up!

Sunday was the big day for new things - my first NASCAR race, the Pennzoil 400 at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway! It was a total VIP experience - we drove right to the infield where we had an RV for us to use as a landing spot for the day. Food, drinks, TVs to watch the race if we so chose, plenty of seating, and a view of the race course from the top of the RV.

I took advantage of the all-access pass, attending the driver's meeting, checking out the line of haulers, and spending most of my time down in the pit where the crew managed the race. While I've never professed to be a NASCAR fan, I have to admit it was a very cool experience! The energy and the noise were energizing, and the enthusiasm of our agency's owner was infectious.

I sat up in the pit box for the 47 car and then for the 37 car, driven by AJ Allmendinger and Chris Buescher, respectively. Having met both drivers the first evening at dinner, then seeing them before the race with the cars, made the race a lot more interesting than expected! Add in the opportunity to wear the headsets in the pit box to hear what was going on and their conversations with the pit crew, and I got a much better idea of just how complicated stock car racing is, and how much strategy is involved in trying to win a race of 400 miles.

AJ, me and Chris in the infield before the race

While I had been warned about how loud it would be at the race, I had no idea what that actually meant. It is SO LOUD!! We had earplugs and headsets and still, the cars' engines screamed as they passed us by running well over 100mph.

If I had to pick one thing that was my favorite of the whole day, it was hearing the roar of the engines climb to a deafening pitch as they came off of a restart lap behind the pace car. When the lead car hit the line where they could accelerate beyond the imposed limit, the sound made my heart race, my nerves tingle, and my eyes sharpen a little bit more to watch the cars go by as a blur. I don't see me becoming anything more than a passing NASCAR fan, but seeing a race in person was certainly an experience I'd try again!