SBC 2008 Week In Pictures

OK, so none of these really have anything to do with the SBC. Too bad.



My hotel: The Crowne Plaza at Union Station. It is still a working train station.


The hotel was full of these plaster "mannequins." To me, they looked like the mummies from the Mt. Vesuvius eruption. Or ghosts.



Plaster sailor lighting a cigarette. This is looking out my room door. The train cars have been converted into suites.



The RCA Dome: the home of the Indianapolis Colts. It was right across the street from my hotel.



The Indianapolis Motor Speedway... Home of the Indy 500.



I spied a few pace Corvettes doing laps. I have no idea how fast they were going.



Rounding Turn 4 in the bus.



Pit Road and The Pagoda.



The Start/Finish Line. Originally, the entire 2.5 mile track was paved with 3.6 million bricks (hence its nickname, The Brickyard. The original paving bricks are under the asphalt, except for this 9-brick strip at the Start/Finish.


Coming into Turn 1.



Our driver kept it under 220 mph. In the time it took us to complete a lap, an Indy car would have lapped us seven times.



To enter/exit the Museum parking lot, you have to drive under the track and the grand stands.



The idiots from Fred Phelps' "church" were there to protest. I just don't get it. Thankfully, there were just two of them and even the secular press ignored them.



Huh?

Road Trip ’08 - Day 1

Jefferson City, MO to Lexington, KY
506 miles; 7 hours 49 minutes
States driven through: Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky
Dead deer seen on side of road: 8
Smokies: 6

Leslie’s flight into STL was early, so we got a nice head on the trip.

It rained about 75 percent of the drive through Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky. That didn’t keep us from stopping on the side of the road and posing for pictures at the Welcome to _____ sign.

We officially left God’s Time and are now operating on Eastern Time.

Since we were passing through Louisville, we placed a quick cal to the expatriated Kentuckians, the Todds. They, of course, were not home.

While in L-Ville, we took a quick detour and went to see Churchill Downs the site of the Kentucky Derby (to be run in a few weeks). It was HUGE, but it seemed out of place since it is smack dab in the middle of urban Louisville. We were about 45 minutes late to tour the museum and shop, so we settled on just taking some pix of the exterior.

Onto Lexington and home of the Wildcats, the University of Kentucky. Lex is very hard to navigate, but we found our way to campus. Leslie almost decided to switch from ‘Cuse to UK, but thankfully she talked herself out of it.