Sports travels: Bristol Motor Speedway

I was recently merging photos I had stored on various computers onto a single thumb drive, and came across photos I had taken from visiting sports venues over the years. So I figured I'd share some of them, along with some stories behind them.

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Several years ago, Mrs. Last Honest and I were contemplating a vacation around a friend's wedding in Durham, N.C., when she came to me with an idea.

We could fly into Raleigh, then drive to Asheville, which is one of our favorite places, for a couple days. Then we could drive a couple hours down out of the mountains to Knoxville, TN, for the University of Tennessee and the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame ...

... "and if you're good, you can go to Bristol."

Apparently I was good, because when we left Knoxville, we drove the couple hours up to Bristol Motor Speedway. The first thing I noticed about the track was before we ever got there, namely that it is out in the middle of nowhere. It actually appears to be nowhere near the city itself or the famous sign indicating Bristol straddles the states of Virginia and Tennessee.

It was quite the chore just getting there.

Yes, I stood in the middle of the road to take this picture.

We weren't sure how much we were going to be able to see once we got there. I had called ahead about tours, and there weren't any the day we were going to be there, as there was supposed to be some kind of testing going on that day, I think for a Late Model series of some kind. But the woman said we could watch the testing if we wanted.

However, when we got there, we were told the track wasn't open at all. I registered some displeasure at this, and the woman told me there was one open gate I could go through if I wanted to see the track, so long as I stayed in the stands.

I was cool with that, so off to the track we went.

I would have been OK with this.

After a little while gazing around some the bleachers, someone (I have no idea who) told us that we could walk down on the track if we wanted to, as long as we didn't bring our car on the track.

I didn't run through the fence, but I didn't exactly waste my time getting down there. Once I was down on the track, it seemed strangely ... small. Being only a half-mile, it obviously doesn't have as large a footprint as a Daytona or Charlotte, both of which we've been to, but I imagined stands stretching up into the sky, and it didn't look that way.

Somehow, I imagined it would be bigger.

Of course, the nice part about Bristol being a half-mile track was that it wasn't very hard to walk around. Walking up, though, was a bit more of a challenge. This was in the days before the track was reconfigured, so the banking was a straight 36 degrees.

It's pretty steep. Notice the tire marks headed toward the wall in the upper left-hand corner.

Check out the gouges in the concrete.

After we had explored as much as we could, we headed out after an unexpectedly up-close look at the track.