Casey Mears Chicagoland Diary

Day 4: Thursday, July 10, 2003

So much for sleeping in, I got up bright and early today at 8:00 a.m. I even surprised myself by waking up so early. I went for an hour-long run around the motorcoach lot and Chicagoland Speedway's infield. Then I came back to the motorcoach and took a shower.

I left to go meet my crew guys at their hotel, which is about 40 minutes away. I feel sorry for those guys this weekend. They're going to have to get up real early every morning to make it to the track in time for the garage to open.

After meeting up with the guys, we headed to Wrigley Field to try to get into the Cubs game. We went to the ticket counter first to try to get tickets and I got the last four seats they were selling. Pretty lucky. They were good seats too - right behind the Cubs dugout about 10 rows up. This was my first time to Wrigley Field so it was a pretty cool experience.

We left the game in the last inning and walked to a local bar close to the stadium. We had a drink there and watched all of the people leave the stadium. We headed back to the guy's hotel after that and got stuck in some major traffic. I think I spent half of my day in the car traveling somewhere and stuck in traffic.

After dropping off the guys, Jimmy Elledge and I headed back to the speedway and grabbed dinner on the way. I'm back in the motorcoach now watching some T.V. and resting. Tomorrow I'll be practicing and qualifying in the Fujifilm Busch car and the Fujifilm Winston Cup car. It will be a very busy day!

Fuji has given me a Q1 camera that they sell at Target Stores and a Fujifilm F410 digital camera for the weekend. I'm going to be taking photos every day documenting my race weekend. Winston Cup Scene is going to print some of the photos next week. Also, we're having that auction on Ebay for Fujifilm and we're putting a few of the print photos in there. I can't wait! These cameras are really cool. It should be interesting to be a Fujifilm photographer for a weekend!

Later,

Casey