Bandimere is a local drag strip. It must be a pretty important/good one since it hosted some sort of national competition this last summer. Ellie's friend, Christy, lives a few miles east of it and on some nights they can hear the roar of the engines. We pass it on our way to many different places. Each time we pass it Ellie declares that she wants to go. When Bob, Ethan's boss, offered us free tickets Ellie and I took the opportunity to go.
We had a good time. I spent some time on the tracks when I was growing up since my father paints race cars for a living. I was surprised how much I remembered and how it felt. I both enjoyed it and missed the fact that my father is not part of my life. It creates an ache in me that can only be fixed by him. Ellie enjoyed it, but it was not quite what she was expecting. After questioning her, I realized that what she wants to see is a real drag race, with dragsters with parishoots and the whole deal. This set of races was for anyone who wanted to show up, pay up and go. The trends were a bit surprising. The fast looking cars with nice paint jobs or the sports cars were often the slowest. A lime green VW Bug beat a Porsche. A big stomper truck so jack up that you needed a ladder to get in beat many other small, light cars. There were station wagons, SUVs and a lot of little, old cars that looked like junkers. One of the top cars was a hatch back wind-up looking car most likely from the 1970's. The paint job was awful with black spray paint over primer, but boy was it fast! It could do the 1/4 mile in 10.2 (which translates to 139 mph!) In fact, most of the winning cars were like that. It was clear that most, rather all of them, spent their money on the engine and not the paint job. After a while we wander around at the car show portion. She loved the auto stereo section. I didn't like the way the bass thumped in my chest and was pushing to move on. We both thought the remote control drifter cars looked like a lot of fun, but we could not play since we did not have any cars of our own. We checked out the cars. Many had the hoods up to show off their sparkly clean and apparently impressive engines. A few of the guys even set up little venues with the cars on carpets bedeck led with statues, fake gem stones and signage. A few looked like their were gussied up for the red carpet awards. Our favorite was the cool low rider truck you can see in the photos I've posted above. Another part,which we both thought was tacky, was the Miss Whoocie, oh no, I mean Miss Street Tuner competition. The girls paraded themselves around wearing skirts so short that my kitchen towel has more cloth to it. They had push up bras and nearly nothing their panties. Their butts hung out way past their "skirts" and they still felt the need to bend over often. They also strutted around in their stiletto heels. I was disgusted and made Ellie promise that she would never demean herself like that. She laughed and reminded me that she wears long boy's swimming trunks over her girl's swim suit. We stayed a bit longer and enjoyed the "burnout" contest. The goal is to produce a longer, more impressive plume of smoke from your tires than anyone else. You can see the winning car above. As he drove off his tires popped. Let's hope that he was the winner who got a new set of tires since he will need them to get home.
It was time well spent with my girl. We had fun and now she knows what that is all about.
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