We headed to Norwalk with a few different motivations. Mine were for our team to get our program headed back in the right direction and my kids' motivation was to wear out the Cedar Point amusement park and the water slides at our hotel, the Kalahari Resort. I will say that Cedar Point has the best rollercoasters I have ever been on and after some serious coercing I talked my wife into going on the "Maverick" rollercoaster with me. It is by far the best one I have ever been on. After listening to my wife scream the whole ride she did admit that she loved it and actually wanted to go on it again, unfortunately the long line prevented me from finding out if she was serious.
After leaving Cedar Point, which we headed to straight from the airport, we arrived at our hotel. The place is amazing. I think it has twenty or so indoor water slides, from little ones for the small children to some pretty serious ones for the older kids and adults. My oldest daughter Ashley and Rob Flynn's daughter Stacy (Rob is the crew chief on the Hot Rod Fuller driven Caterpillar dragster) have become great friends over the years. In fact she stayed with us the whole weekend in our room instead of theirs and they had a blast. We barely saw them at the race track as they refused to leave the water park, from early in the morning 'till late at night they spent every minute attacking the water slides! My youngest daughter Sydney was a little scared of the big ones and spent most of her time playing on the small slides with Antron Brown's daughter Arianna.
Qualifying was very interesting. Due to some serious rain in the area the past week the racetrack began having water seep up due to the heat, which made the track unsafe to race on. After an exhausting effort, qualifying was cancelled on Friday. After losing two runs on Friday it really changes the approach to qualifying. Knowing you only have two runs makes your approach different and you get conservative, going down the track becomes very important. We made a pretty conservative run and ended qualifying in the ninth position. We would face Tony Schumacher again first round. We usually do okay when facing him in the first round but this time he made a good run and we made an average one and got beat. We now head out on the west coast swing, Denver, Seattle and Sonoma on three consecutive weekends. With the races preceding the countdown to the championship dwindling this is a very important group of races, we are currently about 4 or 5 rounds outside of the cut line for the countdown and we need to get it together now.
Keep up the support for our team, we really appreciate it.
Thanks for reading,