Conversation: C. Edwards (cont'd)

Q: With all the political unrest in Thailand at the end of November, and not to throw Jimmie Johnson under the bus for cancelling his trip to Thailand, which had nothing to do with yours -- did you ever consider not going?

Edwards: Oh yeah, for sure, and Jimmie and I talked about it. Jimmie was on a different [agenda]. My trip was me and three of my buddies. I think his trip was more something with his family, you know? I think if I were taking my fiancée or my mom or something, it probably would have been a little harder for me to go there considering that they had just a little bit of unrest.

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But once I got there and I saw what was going on anybody that is thinking about going there should go. It's the most -- it's an amazing place. The people, in general are so peaceful and kind. We were driving this van, and we had a 750-kilometer trip -- whatever that is in miles.

I'm driving along the road and people drive exactly how you wish people would drive -- everybody just goes as fast as they can and generally gets out of everybody's way. It's just a free-for-all -- it's awesome. So we're driving along, and I couldn't even figure out what the speed limit was.

So Lonnie [Clouse] from MRO [Motor Racing Outreach's lead chaplain in the Nationwide Series] was with us and he's reading the little tourism guide that we've got, and he says 'it says right here that the traffic laws are generally liberally interpreted.' So [laughing] I'm like, 'awesome,' and we just drove like maniacs.

But my point is, that you could be driving down the road and the few police officers that we saw -- it didn't matter how you were driving -- they just smiled and waved. They were just happy to be there and happy that you were driving. So I was surprised at how nice people were and I didn't feel that once we were there for a few days, that we were in any danger whatsoever.

I'm not going to throw Jimmie under the bus because I think he was probably the smart one to be cautious -- but it worked out, luckily, for us.

Q: Overall, what was your take on Thailand?

Edwards: Well, we landed in Bangkok, and the plan was to ride bicycles -- we were not going to rent a car -- just ride bikes, roughing-it and packing all our stuff on the bicycles. So we landed, and certain guys in our party, I'll not say who, they're like, 'there's no way in hell we're gonna ride our bicycles out of this airport.' It's a zoo in Bangkok.

So I went and rented a van and we just drove out of the airport. We got the GPS unit, we got this van and loaded all our stuff up and we head off down the road -- and you can't read half the road signs, they don't have any English on them.

So we're just headed down the road and we decided, 'let's drive to Phuket,' which is the resort city in the south of Thailand. We drove 500 miles in the course of two days down to Phuket, and just had a blast -- it was really fun.

Q: So you just threw the bikes in the van?

Edwards: Yeah, we did. We didn't ride the bikes until we got all the way back to Bangkok, and then for two days we rode all around Bangkok on bicycles, and it was crazy. The videos, which people can go to carledwards.com to take a look at, are really neat. We saw a lot of things that were just crazy.

There are not a lot of Americans over there. We did not meet any Americans until about the fifth day of our trip, when we got back to Bangkok. So it was really neat, in that respect, because we met people from all over the world.

Everything that was going on [politically] had nothing to do with Westerners. And I'm telling you, everything was really cheap and everybody was really nice. Even the people selling stuff on the beach were nice -- even one of those guys who gave me one of those fake watches, when I tried to give him some money as a tip, he wouldn't take it. That was pretty cool because most people wouldn't do that. (Continued)