A Trip Up North, and More…

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August 24th, 2017

One week ago I posted my weekly Thursday Blog Day installment and lamented the fact that my Thursday posting schedule meant a lot of the fun stuff I will now being doing each week will happen the day after the blog. For instance, on Friday afternoon I left Woodbury and headed for Brainerd. Seems like a long time ago, now. But, as we say so technically and gracefully, it is what it is. So here we are on this particular Thursday with a chance to wrap up the last week.

For the record, driving up to the Brainerd Lakes region, or really anywhere in northern or north-central Minnesota, on a summer Friday is a recipe for one thing. Traffic. And lots of it. Minnesotans love their lakes, their Walleye, and their boats, which means they also love their cabins up by those lakes, Walleye, and boats. And that makes for a mass exodus on Friday afternoons as they venture north.

It’s roughly 150 miles from Woodbury to Baxter, and the track is just north of Baxter, so that should take (“should” being the operative word) about 2.5 hours, since much of it is state or county roads rather than interstates. Except it was a summer Friday afternoon. Heck, it took me more than an hour just to get around the north side of the Twin Cities on the I-694 loop! Nearly four hours after backing out of my driveway, I arrived at Madden’s Resort on Gull Lake. Burned out and tired of it, too.

This is the prescription for relieving the stress of bumper-to-bumper traffic… (Click to enlarge and appreciate even more)

So, it was a wonderful thing to have this view from my room. And, for the first time in all my stays at Madden’s my room was in one of the original buildings, which was cool. They’ve been improving and adding on to Madden’s for a million years (slight exaggeration) but it all started with one big lodge and I finally got a chance to stay there. Rustic, wonderful, quirky, luxurious, quaint, and did I say wonderful? It’s all of that.

It’s like a step back in time, in a lot of ways, but the balcony view of the lake was right there in the present. All of the Gull Lake resorts are great, and all are a bit different in how they approach things and aim for their key demographics, but I’ve become pretty attached to Madden’s. This will not have been my last visit there, and since Barbara’s work kept her chained to her desk all weekend, and she therefore couldn’t come up with me since her desk is too big for the car, I told her that we should pick a non-race weekend, or play hooky during a week, and come up for some real R&R. We need to do that.

I had a nice dinner, went to bed fairly early, and looked forward to being at the track all day on Saturday. I knew they’d had a lot of rain in the days leading up to the race, so despite the fact it was sunny and perfect on Saturday I also knew I’d need to get out there pretty early. Why? Because the reserved parking lots flood fairly easily, and since I was driving Barb’s little Lexus hot rod RC300 coupe (she wanted my larger car for the weekend) I didn’t really want to either park in the mud, or in water, or get stuck.

When I got to the track, and pulled into the Red Key/Gold Key lot, the guy pointed to the end of the current row of cars they were organizing. Between me and the end of that row was a veritable swamp of mud, muck, and water. I rolled my window down and said, “Hey man, I don’t know if this little car can get through that, and worse this actually my wife’s car.” He smiled and said, “I gotcha. Put it right here.”

“Right here” was the first spot off the entry road. Good dude. And much appreciated.

I walked into Brainerd International Raceway just like I have for decades, and the beautiful thing is that it remains not much different than my first trip. And, if you’ve read my book “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts” you may recall that Brainerd, in 1992, was the first race I attended as the Vice President of Motorsports Marketing, Inc. which is a fancy way of saying it was the first NHRA race I attended as the assistant to the guy in New Jersey who represented Chuck Etchells.

There’s never any doubt that you’re “up north” in Brainerd

BIR is special, in so many ways, and it’s really unique in many glorious ways as well. It has an entirely different vibe from any of the other tracks on the Mello Yello tour, and even the air feels different up there just 100-some miles north of Minneapolis. You have no problem knowing exactly where you are. And I say that because anyone who has been on the tour for any length of time knows that surreal feeling of standing on the track and realizing your brain is thinking, “Wait a minute. Where are we this week?” or being in the pits and thinking, “Which way is the starting line from here?”

I headed straight for the Wilkerson pit, not exactly sure where it was located but sure of the fact that I’d have to run into it once I came in the gate and turned right after the Nitro Mall. The Nitro pits in Brainerd are just one long aisle, with rigs on either side of it. A little more than halfway down the aisle, I was there, but only after running into a series of crew guys, drivers, NHRA officials, and others who said hello and asked how the book was going. In so many ways, it was really great to be back.

I hung out with Tim, Krista, and the team for a number of hours, and was thrilled when our longtime friend Tom “Shorty” Shannon showed up with a tray of pulled pork and his amazing french fries. Shorty had to sell his restaurant in Cottage Grove, just south of Woodbury, when a developer came in and bought the whole strip center with the intent of demolishing it and putting in something new, but Shorty hasn’t forgotten how to make those fries.

One of the first things I did was take the golf cart back out to the parking lot to unload six more boxes of books, out of the trunk. That would be 42 in total. We needed them because the souvenir trailer was down to their last three copies. Just as I was doing that longtime blog reader, Facebook friend, and now cat sitter to the stars (Boofus and Buster) Erica Moon showed up in the Wilk pit. She came with me and helped load and unload boxes. I had one thing to accomplish before I took the first three boxes to the souvenir stand, though. I had to open three boxes and sign all 21 of them with a Sharpie, and then Wilk was gracious enough to drop what he was doing to sign them as well. From there, Erica helped me get them over to the trailer.

Hanging with the PR pros in the Media Center

When it was time for Q3, I made the long trek down to the Media Center, which is roughly 12.25 miles away from the pit. Again, a slight exaggeration, but if you’re familiar with BIR you know how spread out it is. Like Topeka, it’s spread out so much almost all the teams use their golf cars and scooters to get to the staging lanes, so a former PR guy who is now just promoting his book had to hoof it. I did that at least five times during the day, back and forth, so I’m guessing I’d have hit the 20,000 step mark if I’d had a FitBit on. It’s a long way.

I don’t have a “Restricted Area” pass anymore, so I watched Q3 from the Media Center, surrounded mostly by former colleagues I still know well and respect a ton. There are some new NHRA people on the Media Relations staff, though, so Brainerd was a great chance for me to get to know them and let them know who I might be, and that I’d be at all the rest of the races other than Reading. Gotta stay relevant out there, right?

I had prepaid for two nights at Madden’s, but I told my captive wife that if the day ended on time, and if I didn’t feel too tired, I might just pack up the car and head home. The room was paid for and it would be well past check-out time, so I would just load up and go. After Q4, and after selling and signing a bunch of books, I dashed for the car and headed back to the resort. And I yawned. It was a big yawn, too. I knew right then that I was tired, and making the drive back home was probably not the smartest thing. It could’ve been done, but why tempt fate? I got a good night’s sleep and was rolling at 9:30 on Sunday morning, taking the route that heads east out of Brainerd over to Mille Lacs, then taking route 169 south, around the west side of the huge lake and straight back down to I-94, where it intersects right outside of the Twin Cities. I got home at 12 noon.

It had been a fun little trip, to a place I always love visiting, and I’m really happy I’m doing this publicity tour to this many tracks. It’s great to be out there but free from the stress of working in a traditional PR sense. I’m just “working the room” to promote the book, and then I head back home.

Indy is next, of course, and since that race happens on a Monday I’ll be flying down on Saturday and spending only Sunday at the track. If you’re coming to “The Big Go” and have the book, bring it with you! If you don’t have it yet, get it on Amazon or buy it at the track. The personalized signatures are free of charge. Just come find me at Wilk’s pit.

This week has been pretty quiet, which is not a bad thing after a year and a half of writing, editing, and promoting a book. With six more races for me to attend, and with all of them requiring Delta airplanes, National rental cars, and hotels of various styles and ilks, I’ll be plenty busy right into mid-November. A quiet week is good, although I also had the opportunity to have fantastic lunches with great guys the last two days. Fun conversations with two guys I really like and respect. Great catching up with both of them.

The big thing on the horizon for me, and Neighbor Dave, happens on Sunday night. The San Francisco 49ers will be in town to play the Vikings at US Bank Stadium, and we will be there for Sunday Night Football. We won’t be in seats, though. We’ll be on the field holding the big round parabolic microphones for KNBR, the official 49ers radio station that covers all their games. I’ve known Mike Hohler for many years, thanks to the blog, and he’s the executive producer for the games. We set this up quite a while a go, and now the appointed Sunday is nearly upon us. If you happen upon the game on TV, look for us on the sidelines.

And now, keeping to our new tradition, I will leave you with a fun story that somehow didn’t make the final editing cut for the book…

When I graduated from Mary, Queen of Peace elementary school and headed off to St. Louis U. High, a number of my MQP classmates made the same transition, from the nuns to the Jesuits. One of them was Mick Bayer, although we all called him Mickey back then. I’d lost total track of him for most of the last 43 odd years, until I stumbled onto his Facebook page and we reconnected. One of the first notes I sent to him had to do with his father, and his muscle cars.

As freshmen at SLUH, our parents set up a mutual carpooling situation, wherein my mom and I would swing by Mick’s house (not far at all from our home) and pick him up on certain days, and on the others my mom would drop me at the Bayer home so that I could ride with Mick and his dad. Almost invariably, after I’d knock on the door I’d be invited in and the Bayer family would still be finishing breakfast, which as I recall seemed to feature mostly just toast. Odd that I remember that, but I think it’s true.

Mick’s dad loved Mopar muscle cars, and while I do not recall what specific models he had, I remember him having a couple of them. I’d slide into the back seat, and hold my breath for the entire 20-minute ride to SLUH. Mick’s dad’s opinion was, “I love these Mopar muscle cars and they don’t like to go slow, so I have the remedy for that.”

I felt like we were in a NASCAR race every time I rode with Mick and his dad. And I clearly remember sideswiping either another car or a street sign once. Just like the NASCAR boys say, rubbin’ is racin’ so that’s how it went. I was literally petrified every morning his dad drove us down there. And, to make it more terrifying, his dad never drove us to school on Highway 40, the most direct and rapid way to get from their house to SLUH, down by Forest Park in the city. We drove surface streets, usually on Clayton Rd., each morning. And he’d be on and off that throttle with a lead foot, making those big motors howl while he veered into and out of various lanes. It was, I guess, a thrilling way to get your blood moving before another long day in various classrooms. I have never forgotten it. Those tales were in the original manuscript, but since they really didn’t tie into any other themes in the book we decided they were fun but expendable. And now they’ve seen the light of day. Thanks, Mick!

I guess I’ll see you next week. Remember, if you somehow got through this blog installment and enjoyed it, please click on the “Like” button at the top.

Bob Wilber, at your service and still recovering from those morning races to SLUH.

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