'aRoo with a View.: V8s; and i don't mean the juice.

i know i say this a lot, but i apologize for the delay in posts. we have been busy, busy! i have "heaps" to tell you, but let's take it one step at a time.

beginning with the weekend before our trip home to st. louis. this was jim's birthday weekend since he celebrated turning 28 on july 5th. we had a small celebration at the mine with presents, decorations and cake, but for the weekend jim wanted to head to townsville (again!). this time, however, there was an event on called the v8 supercar races.

so, i got jim general admission tickets for his birthday and we headed up north for the weekend.

can i just say that every which way we turned we were surprised by the unexpected?!? it was AMAZING!

starting with us stepping out of our hotel on saturday to find our way to the races. we could hear the cars zooming around the race track so we thought it wasn't too far, but we weren't sure if it was walking distance or if we should grab a cab. so, we stepped into a coffee shop to see a guy wearing some jim beam memorabilia; surely he was going to the races, right? so, we were asking him for some advice as to how we should get to the races when the super nice individual offered us a ride with him and his friends that were on their way. after making sure, several times, that he was okay with his offer we took him up on the ride. we soon found out he was #12 , racing for jim beam!! and his buddy was #49 racing for VIP (which is a pet store here)! i sort of felt star struck even though i know nothing about the v8s. we soon became both steve owen (VIP) and dean fiore (jim beam) number 1 fans.

we even got some memorabilia and another photo op since we now had a "connection"!

continuing with our expecting the unexpected story... we were probably 500 feet into the race grounds when we ran into a friend of ours who gave us complimentary passes to box seats! benefits included free food, beer and much better seats than ours, which were on the lawn (score!)!

soon we realized that in order to get to our box seats we also were afforded visibility of all the pits!! how cool is this and how lucky are we?!?

i think the jim beam team quickly began thinking we were stalkers as we just kept "showing up" wherever they were...

and this was our view of all the pits stops from the box!

we were happy happy campers.

but the luck did not stop there. soon we learned that we were going to get an up and close personal tour of the holden pit where we got to see the insides of the cars and some of the drivers on a more personal level!

so that pretty much takes the cake, right??? oh no... the luck keeps coming. then we found out that we get to explore the grid before the big race!!! we pretty much felt like royalty.