The week's coming to a busy close. After tomorrow's whirlwind hubby and I are off again to Daytona Beach for the Rolex 24. This will be our fourth year going to that particular motorsports event. I'm hoping for a safe, healthy trip and good weather the whole time. A good race won't hurt, either, of course.
I'm always a little apprehensive about traveling, especially when it's a long trip. This isn't my longest in terms of distance -- we've gone to DAB so much the last eight years it's practically a milk run -- but it's a whole weekend away with a lot of miles on the road, and you never know what may happen. Then you're in a place that's not your home, trying to do things in a constrained time, so that governs when you get up, when you go out, when you eat, etc., etc.
And the Rolex 24 brings with it a little apprehension, especially given what happened when we went for the second time, in 2006, when I brought home an unwanted souvenir. A general admission ticket will let you come and go as you please during the race (it is, after all, a 24-hour race, and who wants to remain in the stands the whole time?). We'd gone for the first few hours of the race and then went out to get something to eat, run errands and so forth. Then we came back to watch some of the night racing.
Now, hubby and I like to walk pretty much the length of the frontstretch stands, as there's something really nifty about all these really loud, really fast cars zooming right by you only a few feet away. But it's easy to forget that those cars also kick up a bunch of stuff off the track when they pass. Which, it just so happened, one of them did right when we came from under the stands and turned right to go to where we usually sit. Right into my right eyeball, it went. It didn't really hurt that night, just a little "ping" feeling in my eye. I didn't think that much about it, and figured it would work its way out.
Heh. I was mistaken. Next morning, my eye was red, swollen, had congealed crud coming out of it, and the little piece of crud was irritating the daylights out of it and didn't want to come out. But, trouper that I was, I played through it (though in retrospect I wish I'd have sought care on the premises). It hurt like the dickens, but we were there for the end of the race, which was well worth it because the team I was pulling for, with New Zealand's Scott Dixon, won the race.
Then ensued about the most miserable seven hours of my life, the drive home. We tried eyewash solutions, but they didn't work. I tried everything I could think of. But just when I thought it was better, the pain came back. Then we got home, and the agony over my eye was momentarily superseded by something else: we'd lost our digital camera on the trip. Granted, it was an aging, hard to support CD Mavica that we'd have to replace soon anyway...but, still, damn it.
Fortunately, the eyeball story had a happy ending. A local ophthamologist squeezed me in the next morning, got the crud out of my eye, gave me some eyedrops and within days my eye was good as it had ever been. (The doctor, a kindly older gentleman, was a little amused by the circumstances and took to calling me "the race-car lady." Which was a neat little bit of symmetry, given I'd just bought a copy of Janet Guthrie's memoir.)
And I learned a lesson that came in handy the following year. Norm Abram was, and is, right. There is no more important safety tip than to wear these: safety glasses. I have a set of safety glasses with interchangeable lenses (clear/tinted) that I used in a previous line of work, and now when we go to Daytona they come with me and protect my eyes from flying crud. (Although last year I thought the track was out to get me: immediately after the race, right as all of us were leaving, one of the geniuses in the track crew ran one of the blower trucks right past the front stretch where all of us were, blowing grit, bits of rubber and carbon fiber, you name it off the track surface and through the catchfence into us. You want to talk about a nightmare? Blergh.)
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