Hendrick Motorsports driver is looking forward to being a father down the road
SONOMA, Calif. — The marriage will likely take place sometime next summer.
Kids? Somewhere down the road, Dale Earnhardt Jr. said Friday at Sonoma Raceway.
“Of course, you want to have children,” NASCAR’s most popular driver said. “I think the greatest accomplishment in life is to be able to raise a child. That’d be awesome. … I’ve felt that way for a long time; but it’s just a timing thing. Get married first and find that person that you want to spend your life with.”
Earnhardt, driver of the No. 88 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet, proposed to long-time girlfriend Amy Reimann a week ago while the couple was in Germany during a short break in the Sprint Cup Series season.
“She definitely wants to have kids and I’ve always wanted to have kids. That’s definitely something we’ll be looking at,” he said.
The trip had been in the works for several years — Earnhardt was interested in his family’s lineage and information gleaned from the Internet was only so definitive.
“Even though it is Ancestry.com and they do a great job and have a great service, you still have to see this stuff with your own eyes to believe it,” he said. “Because we are talking about stuff that is 300 years old and there is a lot of hearsay that can get injected into something like that over that time.”
The wedding proposal was planned, if not rehearsed.
“It didn’t have to be perfect and maybe if it wasn’t perfect that was a good thing,” he said. “I didn’t want to set it up to where it was cheesy I just wanted it to be natural and impromptu.
“The town we were in was Illesheim (Germany) and my 10th and 9th grandfather lived there, went to church there and that church is the church that they went to. It’s over 1,000 years old apparently, a very old church. The town is very old. There were 300 people living in it 300 years ago and there are 300 people living in it today. Nothing has really changed.”
So standing inside the same church attended by his ancestors centuries ago, Earnhardt said he knew the moment had arrived.
“I’ve been planning on it for several months. I was hoping for years that Amy and I would get married and it just seemed like over this last year, it made more sense to me and that the timing was right. And I picked that particular spot just because I wanted her to feel special. …
“I think to do it at that particular time, at that moment while we were in that church, may make that moment more memorable for her. And I thought it was just a great place to do it. I thought about it. Every other spot that I could think of just didn’t measure up, you know? It just wasn’t good enough or special enough for her.”