Recently, Ronan has been interested in racing cars, particularly when they crash during a race. He loves building wooden tracks and playing with his toy cars. Brielle started school before Ronan, so we were trying to think of something special to do with him. It suddenly occurred to me that we actually live near a famous race track, so we drove to Daytona Beach!
The Daytona International Speedway was a little less than an hour away. When I told Ronan where we were going, he was excited. Unfortunately, I realized that in his head he was imagining getting to watch a car race with possible crashes...and that wasn't going to be part of the journey.
However, we did have a fantastic interactive experience with the race track, and Ronan loved it. We went on a tram tour that drove us around the outside of the stadium and onto the track.
Since we're not racing fans, we hadn't thought about how huge a race track stadium must be to accommodate cars driving at extreme speeds. We were amazed by the size of it. In fact, we learned that it's so long that when they constructed the stadium, they had to take into account the curvature of the Earth, which made each end differ by seven inches!
The tour had several stops where we could get out and see the track, the stands, and other points of interest.
The stadium chairs were painted to look like a black and white racing flag in one part and a multicolored crowd scene for the rest.
The tour ended by dropping us off in a racing museum that we didn't realize existed. Fantastic opportunity for Ronan to see real racing cars.
Ronan stood in front of the car was last year's Daytona 500 winner.
Even though Kraig and I aren't racing fans, we had a great time with Ronan and loved seeing him get excited by the vast racing track and all the cool, fast racing cars.
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