Jon and I got up at 4:30 to go to the Daytona 500, about an hour north of our house on the Atlantic coast.
We met with the other volunteers in Melbourne at 5 and got our credentials to get on the race track. One of Jon’s coworkers, Greg, invited us to ride with him in his Forerunner, so we didn’t have to take our car all the way up there.
When we got to Daytona it was still dark and despite the morning fog it looked promising for a beautiful day. The first bus from the parking area didn’t leave before 7, but I still had to get my run in anyway, so I said good bye to Jon and Greg and took off.
The sun rose quickly and it was a nice run.
I had all my changing clothes in the car and just before I wanted to take the next bus to join them at the booth we were to sell the beverages Jon called me and asked to bring the folding chair. So I grabbed the thing and jumped in the next bus that took me around the airport to the entrance.
The gate supervisor was the kind of a man who think they’re the most important people in the whole world. Even though many of the other volunteers had brought their own chairs he would not let me in with it. Even though some of his co-workers tried to help me and I called Jon who also tried to help he still considered the chair an “illegal object” that I wasn’t supposed to bring in. I could, though, go to another gate not far away that was only accessible by vehicles. I was very upset with that guy and walked away just because I would have yelled at him had I stayed. Jon tried to get a vehicle while I walked over there. People were walking out of the gate, but when I tried to walk in, the gatekeeper of course wouldn’t let me. I felt so stupid standing there in front of the wide open gate carrying that damn chair that I was almost ready to go back home right away. It was a good thing that we didn’t have our car there or I would have just left.
There were also golf carts driving in and out all the time and after a while I got lucky and a friendly lady in a golf cart agreed to give me a ride through the gate. 10 yards behind the gate I got off and Jon who had been waiting on the other side and I started walking towards our stand. Sure enough the story wasn’t quite over yet. In another golf cart came the guy from the first gate to yell at us again for carrying the dangerous illegal object around. Lucky for us he got distracted when somebody else asked him a question so we just walked away.
After that whole story I was completely frustrated, but I had one of my lunch sandwiches and that made everything better.
We didn’t really sell that much, because the weather was cool and dry and people weren’t that thirsty. It was slow all day, but we still had fun. Jon held the huge beer cans up in the air to advertise what we had to sell.
We didn’t get to see much of the actual race, a “shorter” 300 mile long NASCAR race that was over in the afternoon. We still had to wait around for inventory, got stuck in traffic and were very tired when we came home after 8pm. The rest of the evening was once more spent just hanging out at home, because we were just too exhausted to do anything else.
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