Off Topic Part II - Robert Richardson, Jr

We had a fabulous day yesterday. We dropped Hadyn off at a friend's house for an all day play date and the three of us (Mom, Dad, and Hunter) cruised out to Texas Motor Speedway for NASCAR Sprint Cup practice and qualifying. We walked around and collected all sorts of neat NASCAR trinkets around the midway. We also found ourselves on TV during the live recording of NASCAR Live! on Speed. Cool!!

But the highlight of our day came after leaving TMS. We came flying back to McKinney to hopefully make it to a meet and greet with Robert Richardson, Jr. Robert is a NASCAR Nationwide Series and in a couple of weeks Sprint Cup Series driver AND Robert is from McKinney! He grew up here and played football for the McKinney Lions. He went to SMU to play football, too. But somewhere in there got the racing bug and has moved up through the ranks to NASCAR's elite levels of racing. Since he is not on one of the "Big" teams (his dad is his team owner), he has to literally race his way into a race. There are a certain number of cars that do not have enough "owners points" to make each race, so he may not make each race. Therefore, we need to really cheer on our local guy!!

Anyway, we did make to to see Robert and got to spend some great time with him. He and Hunter got to hang out and swap autographed pictures - at Robert's request! In this picture Robert is holding the autographed karting pic of Hunter and Hunter is holding his autographed pic of Robert. How cool! Then Robert put Hunter into his Sprint Cup car (top picture). This car is the actual car that will be qualifying to race at Talledega in a few weeks. So when we watch that car at Talledega we will be cheering even more so, because Hunter sat down in that car!!! When asked if we were going to make it to the race at TMS today (Nationwide) or on Sunday (Sprint Cup), we had to say no. We laughed and said that now that we're into karting, we've made some alternate budget choices. Robert and his dad laughed and then Robert winked at Hunter and told him that maybe he could hook him up with some sponsorship down the road. Now, we could go for that! ;)

Hunter has been floating on cloud nine since Wednesday and getting to see Jeff Hammond and David Ragan again and now with this, I just don't know if I'll ever get him down again. That's okay, Mom is floating up there with him just so happy for him!

Fun times!!