If you remember from last year Brainerd was the site of the annual golf trip for me and my buddies. This year there was no golf trip. In life we seem to get reality checks when we least expect them. One of my best buddies earlier in the year felt some discomfort in his knee after playing a few days in a row during a golf tournament. upon visiting his doctor to find out the culprit we were all stunned to hear the reason: there was a tumor in his knee.

After undergoing chemotherapy and knee replacement and seemingly on the road to recovery, he developed a blood infection incurred from the final treatments after the knee replacement and just like that he was gone. One week after developing the infection and putting up a fight he passed away.

Reality check #1.

Unfortunately there would be reality check #2.

The western swing is a long grueling string of races. It is hard on everyone, especially the crew members on each team. With a lot of distance to travel in between races and a lot of races in a short period, the guys are really moving.

I will have to say that even though it is difficult it is one of my favorite stretches of races. It is pretty hard to beat the scenery in Denver, Seattle and Sonoma.

Denver brought about a change in how we do things. For the first time we would be racing 1000 feet instead of the standard 1320. I am not a proponent of the switch. I think we should fix the facilities and not change the heritage of our sport as a band aid. I hope the change is only temporary and we go back to the quarter mile next year.

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.