You can call me "Bubba"

Yesterday was the culmination of a life spent as a sports nut - I went to my first NASCAR event up in New Hampshire. Our friends Chon & Jane had extra tickets in two different areas, so Jane went by bus with Jane 2 (and Jane 2's dad & brother), while David and I dropped Jane (ours) off at their house for the bus ride, then drove up to Concord to pick up Chon & his friend Chuck - we drove directly there.

Thoughts on the whole experience:

- On the one hand, David was a little young for it. But the problem wasn't so much the volume (NASCAR events are loud - take 42 unmuffled 700+ horsepower V-8 engines and figure it out!) as it was that David hated the ear protection and wanted it out. You can't rationalize the need for ear protection to a 26-month-old, so what happened was that first I tried the foam earplugs. He hated them and ripped them out. Then, when the engines started at full-blast, he hated the noise and buried his sobbing head in my chest. I covered his ears with my hands and took him out - but then below I found a vendor selling proper headset-style ear protection for $10. I put it on him (he still disliked it), but that muffled the sound well enough that he watched the race for awhile before falling asleep in my arms. For about an hour and a half.

- After he woke up, he was kinda pissed off to find himself at an auto race with mufflers on his head, so he got upset again. After I walked him around for a while, he came back to terms with it and watched the rest of the race.

- Were this a year from now, I could explain to him that the protection was to keep his ears safe, but he doesn't understand that kind of concept yet.

- NASCAR may have upscale demographics, but the crowd I saw was pretty much Bubba. All nice folks, but generally not the demos that NASCAR brags about.

- The traffic getting into and out of Loudon was a lot better than I had been led to believe it would be. Fortunately. I took my minivan four-wheelin' to get out of the parking lot we'd used (a house down the road about a mile and a half from the track that put about 250 of us on their lawn). Right past a parked H2. It felt good.

- David highlight - after his nap, the folks behind us gave him an oatmeal creme cookie from their snack pack. He was pretty hungry. After he ate about half of it, he decided that his hand was messy, so he smeared it all over my nice new golf shirt. It was pretty funny, at least to Chon, Chuck, and all the spectators around us.

- You have to love any sporting event where you can bring your own coolers in, with beer. The only things the pack inspectors worried about were glass bottles. Weapons were also banned. Which comes in handy.

- It's a toss-up as to whether the crowd hates Jeff Gordon or Tony Stewart more. They hate Gordon because he's "Mr. Perfect" and because he wins so much, but they despise Stewart because he's kind of a jerk.

- In a related vein, the best t-shirt there IMO was the omnipresent "Anyone But Gordon" fan shirt.

- I will also go out on a limb and say that I have not seen more polite people at any other crowd gathering than I saw at this race. Even the scalpers were polite.

-Before the race, helicopters swarm the area - shuttling in drivers and spectators. David loved that.

Have I been transformed into a raving NASCAR fan by the experience? Nope. Was it a lot of fun and interesting as hell? Yep. Will I pay more attention when Jane is watching a race on TV? Maybe. Will I go again? Probably, but not for a couple of years. But it was pretty cool.