Sunny race day

8:15am
Well we’re waking up to clear skies and sunshine, but yesterday started off that way too. It got pretty cold last night though…there was ice on the inside of the bottom of the windshield, and frost covering most of the vehicles and grass outside. We had left the furnace on its lowest setting at about 50F (10C) and it cycled on and off several times last night.

The new batteries are holding up very well, as I expected. We had very little power going into them yesterday because of the rain, and Ruth spent quite a bit of time on the computer filing the pictures. Then we watched the movie and had lights on and the furnace on. Getting up this morning they still read over 12.4v which is still lots of power left. Our old batteries under the same conditions would have been down to 11.9v or less, which would have been less than 50% state of charge and therefore not good for the batteries. You are not supposed to go below 12.1v resting, although these Trojan T-105 batteries can cycle down lower than that without severely reducing their lifespan.

12:30pm
Still sunny...not a cloud in the sky. The truck race starts at 2:00pm, so we're going to try and buy some cheap tickets from someone who has them. This race never sells out, so we should be able to get a deal.

10:30pm
We didn’t have tickets for todays truck race, so we walked with Mike and the others to the entrance, asking along the way if anybody had tickets for sale. The Saturday race is never sold out, and we were hoping to get some cheap tickets from someone who was stuck with them. We could have bought them at the ticket window, but they were $35 each and we didn’t want to spend that much. But we couldn’t find anybody who would give us a deal.

Mike had lent us a scanner radio so that we could listen to the drivers talk to their pit crews. They don’t broadcast on the Saturday race, however we were able to listen to the normal radio broadcast. Ruth and I walked up to the top of the hill on the other side of the track and we were able to watch turn 4 and the entire front stretch for free. But it was just the truck race, and we didn’t recognize 90% of the drivers names. Glad we didn’t spend the money on tickets. Definitely looking forward to tomorrows big race though.

We met some of our RV neighbours here where we’re parked. Doug and Sherry, and Carl and Holly from Pennsylvania had a big campfire going, so we sat around the campfire and had a few drinks this evening.

It was a perfect day weatherwise, a huge change from yesterday. The sun was shining all day, and the temperature was about 60F (16C). Forecast for tomorrow is not good though, so I guess we’ll see what happens.