Back in Miami

Well I was back in Miami and what a heck of a weekend, where do I start:

We (BetOnSports) had about 30 guests in a luxury suit for the final race of the NASCAR season, everyone had a great time, you can check out some of the photos here:

http://www.gambling911.com/2005-Nextel-Cup-Photos.html

If you heard on the news of a terrible helicopter crash obviously I wasn't involved, but the crash did happen about 10 minutes after I had taken off with two others in a choper to leave the track, some of our people were still waiting for theirs and saw the crash happen, pretty crazy stuff.

The job is going well and it appears, with the possible exception of a one or two day trip for meetings my travel for 2005 is done, which means I can at least get settled in at the home office before the holidays.

No Hunger Holiday

Well taking a break from the craziness for a day and trading it in for the craziness of No Hunger Holiday.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the event, you can check out our web site here:
www.nohungerholiday.com

To be brief, the event was founded by a fellow Harvester Knight of Columbus and his wife 15 years ago and provides complete Thanksgiving Day meals to needy families throughout the St. Charles County and surrounding areas. This year was a record event for us as we fed more than 1,400 families (about 5,000) people.

I play a very small part in this event as a communications director if you will, trying to drum up publicity for the event through the local press and media. This year was a great one for us as we got good coverage in both the Post Dispacth and Journal but also had coverage from KTVI Fox 2 (it was brief video and they called it the wrong thing, but progress comes in small steps).

Here is a photo album from the event if you want to check it out:


Happy Thanksgiving!

Atlanta Photos Posted

There are tons of them, pictures from Thursday when I got to the track and had time to just kind of "case the joint" to Friday when I actually was driving to the track and by chance drove by a place that had a McMurray show car out, to tons of pictures from the garage area on Friday and the actual race on Sunday, which was won by Missourian Carl Edwards.

You can see the pics by going here:
http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/celticcommunications/slideshow?.dir=/97af&.src=ph

Daytona International Speedway

So I can now say I have been to Daytona Speedway, although it wasn't for the 500, I know now that I do want to go back there to see a race.
I came to Daytona by chance, after the hurricane hit last month and I was without power for a few days I was able to get a rental car out of Miami and drive the 11 plus hours from MIA to Atlanta.
Daytona was right on my way so I figured I couldn't be this close to the track and not go see it. I paid the extra for the tour of the infield, I have to say the tour at Indy is better they actually take you on the track there where at Daytona is was just to the infield, but as you can tell from the pics below I still got to see a lot of cool stuff.

http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/celticcommunications/slideshow?.dir=/d929&.src=ph

Slacking Off on Posts

Well I got back to the states and the work load quickly grew so getting new posts on the blog became a low priority.

I spent part of my weekend though updating photos to the web and will have links posted shortly.

I am scheduled to be back in Miami this weekend for the final race of the Nextel Cup Series schedule. We have some members of our executive team along with 20 customers who won trips that will be going to the races, so it should be both a fun and busy time for me once again. The good news is that one yesterday our car broke a streak of last-place finishes by taking 34th in the race, the bad news is it was involved once again in a pretty bad crash so there is a chance that we won't make the race on Sunday in Miami, but that is vital to us.

More updates will come later this week.