Some of you may know and others probably don’t know that I won’t be here on Friday because my father, sister, brother-in-law, and I are driving down to Martinsville, VA for a weekend of racing. I have watched races at Michigan International Speedway and the Brickyard but Martinsville is definitely my favorite track. It’s a half-mile, paper clip-shaped track that has lacks the banked surface of similarly sized track like Bristol, so the drivers are constantly accelerating out of the turns into the straightaways and then after just a couple of seconds braking as they enter the turn at the opposite end. It tends to be more difficult to pass other cars on this kind of track than on a bigger speedway and there’s always a lot of contact between the cars. I don’t really know anything about cars but I would imagine that 500 laps around the track at Martinsville is pretty demanding on both the cars and the drivers (judging from the number cars that either don’t finish the race or finish any number of laps behind the leader).
So Friday we’ll head down through Ohio and West Virginia and into Virginia, where we’ll watch qualifying on Friday afternoon, the truck race on Saturday (these can be particularly fun because the drivers are pretty aggressive; plus, Darryl Waltrip ran in last year’s truck race), and finally the Cup race on Sunday.
Okay, I know I’m in the minority around here at Visionary for being a racing fan so I’ll stop boring those us of who aren’t into it.  So if you’re not into racing, southwestern Virigina is still a beautiful place to visit and, of course, there are a lot of historical points of interest as well. We usually spend Friday and Saturday nights in Roanoke, a very cool town (lots of great restaurants downtown) that I recommend visiting to anyone who happens to be passing that way.
GO KEN SCHRADER!!!!!!
