My good friend Nicole helped me cross this one off. We left for Daytona in the morning with no plans, no tickets and a cooler full of beer. Once we got to Daytona, I was shocked with the chaos all around. It was great! Tons of people were walking around, music was blaring, it was awesome.
Parking was horrendous. The cheapest parking we could find was $40 ($120 was the highest I saw). We got parked and made some beer snuggies...
One of the neatest things we found out about this NASCAR race was that you could bring in coolers, bags, etc. in with you! So of course we PACKED our purses with beer (and water... for you mom!) and began to venture in! (I fit 9 beers in my purse! Got those packing skills :))
Once we found parking, we had to move onto the next obstacle... tickets. We knew we had a few options, we could go to the gate and get tickets (around $150 each) or we could scalp tickets. Now I know its not completely legal, I don't know the rules and such, but we took a chance. We found a lovely man who sold us tickets for $75 piece (under face value) and we prayed that they were real!!
We followed the crowd into the raceway (our tickets worked! YAY!) and had to get on a tram to get to our seats in one of the towers. We made friends with some people along the way. If I can say anything about NASCAR people, they are some of the friendliest people I have met! We were also suprised with a concert before the race by one of my all time favorites, Brad Paisley! Talk about America!
We enjoyed our seats. I had to ask some people around me for sun screen even though I had applied some before we went in. Darn ginger skin! Everyone was great and everytime the cars passed by, everyone would stand up and watch. Every time they passed by. Everytime.
One thing my dad had advised me to do was to go down right next to the track and walk around so we could be right next to the cars and hear how loud they were. We got up after a little while in our seats and got back on the tram to bring us around. While standing at the ATM, I saw these two guys with these huge yellow earphones on. I wanted to know what they were listening to and of course wanted a picture with those rad earphones!
After we took our picture, we found out that the guys were army vets who were visiting from Arizona specifically for the race. They invited us to come up to their box and gave us tickets to get up. After going down to the track and hearing the cars (great tip daddy!) we found the elevators to the box and went up.
This is the part where the most amazing thing of the day happened to us. We knew we were going up to a box, but we had no idea that we would be in a box RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE STARTING LINE! We literally had some of the best seats in the house (tickets go for about $1,500-$3,000).
We had such a great time. Here are a few more pictures from the day. This was one experience I completely and totally would recommend to anyone and everyone, even if you don't like NASCAR. I had the best time!
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