Timing can be everything in life — who knows that better than drag racers and drag racing fans? — and the fact that I'm writing this on Monday at the Dallas/Fort Worth Int’l Airport during a five-hour layover (cue the Gilligan's Island theme … "A five-hour layover, a five-hour layover) is Exhibit A in my mind as I reach the halfway point on the trek home from the Tire Kingdom NHRA Gatornationals in Florida.

So, anyway, this ship's aground on the shore of this heavily charted isle — for those like me, almost always a middle stop on the way to somewhere else — so instead of skipping today's column (which I wrote yesterday, remember, but as I write it is today for tomorrow's column … hey, timing is everything, right?), I thought I'd share some of the Gatornationals adventure with you. People say that blogs about other people's travel tales are lame, but as a fairly heavy traveler, I always find them interesting and can often relate to the woes set forth.

Unless you're fortunate enough to get one of the rare flights into the Gainesville airport, traveling to the Gatornationals means flying into either Jacksonville to the north or Tampa or Orlando to the south and a two-hour ride to G-town. NHRA almost always flies into Jacksonville — in fact, other than when I met Little Brad to drop off his rental car Saturday, I hadn’t been in the Gainesville airport since 1984, when I took a flight home after my week on the road with Jim DePasse's Top Alcohol Funny Car team.

A few years ago in this space, I wrote a bit about the infamous and fraught-filled Florida frolic that are Highway 301 and 24 that takes you not through the heart of Florida but through the dangerous lairs of many a Smokey Bear. It may be one of the most rigidly enforced speed traps in the nation if not the world, and woe be it to the traveler whose eye veers from a steady (and legal) spot on the speedometer dial.

It's a lonely old night ... just me and a few friends cruising Highway 301.

From Jacksonville, it's about 100 miles of two-lane road with speed limits that rise and fall like the stock market. I made the trek solo this year because McKenna was already in Florida visiting family and Little Brad's travel plans got whacked into the ether by a scheduling snafu, and thanks to a lengthy line at the rental-car counter with a one-person staff, it was well into dark before I hit the road.

Now, like most of you, I'm not one who regularly pays a lot of heed to posted speed limits, usually inching 5 to 10 mph above the maximum, but when I hit 301, I'm a choir boy, a nominee for the Safe Driving Hall of Fame. It's not like I don’t have a good Smokey sense and a keen eye, and even with the perils of radar, I haven't gotten a ticket in (knock on the simulated wood of the Samsung Mobile Courtesy Lounge) many years, but on 301, it's cruise control on and the speedo needle nailed to within a millimeter of the target speed, whether that's 65, 60, 55, 45, 35, or 15 (yes, you'll see them all on this ride!).

Timing being everything again, this year's Gatornationals fell on the weekend of the switch back to daylight saving time. I usually have pretty good fortune combating jet lag, even if it's tough in the Eastern zone to tuck myself into bed at what would be 9 p.m. back home, but this time, I just couldn't do it. I couldn't sleep and stayed up each night/morning way too late checking hockey scores, watching CNN coverage of the disaster in Japan, and playing a handful of those irritatingly addicting Facebook games. When we lost an hour Sunday morning and I had to crawl out of bed at 6 a.m. (the "new" 7 a.m.), it was like getting up at 3 a.m. back home. OK, I know a lot of folks have to regularly get up at o'dark-thirty to go to work, but my cushy office job and 3.1-mile daily commute don't require that.

But you know what? I would have stayed up all night to watch the kind of stuff that went down at Gainesville Raceway. As I pointed out in the story that I wrote for this week's National DRAGSTER, Gainesville is usually the place where history gets made in the nitro classes — first 260-, 270-, and 300-mph runs, etc.), but this year was all about the gas burners.

It started early, in the first Pro Stock Motorcycle session, when Hector Arana became the first bike rider to venture into the 6.7s, and never relented all weekend with the four-wheel Pro Stockers either; all four national records were toppled, and by substantial amounts. By the time that the event was completed, we had witnessed 14 of the 15 quickest e.t.s (including the 10 quickest) in Pro Stock along with the top 14 speeds in that class' history. The incoming quickest and fastest passes of 6.509 and 212.46 ended up 11th and 15th on the all-time lists, and, in that weird phenomenon that accompanies such events where history is made, passes equal to those old bests that, taken alone, would have had us on our feet cheering were met with ho-hum reactions. Simply a matter of timing.

The bike class also battered the record books, with the three quickest e.t.s (and six of the quickest 10) and the five fastest speeds, topped by event winner Eddie Krawiec's jaw-dropping 199.26. I think that a lot of people thought that we'd never see a 200-mph Pro Stock Motorcycle pass, but it's coming. Maybe not this year according to E.K., but it's coming.

As good as those runs were, even Pro Stock winner Jason Line later admitted that all of those who ran in the 6.4s left something on the table during those prime conditions and didn’t catch up to the tune-up until it was too late. Again, it was just a matter of timing.

The other highlight, of course, was the army of drag racing legends at the event, where greats such as Dale Funk, Marvin Graham, Wayne Gapp, Jerry Baltes, Herm Petersen, Dale Emery, Joe Mondello, and many, many, many others signed autographs. There also was a mini Cacklefest Sunday, and longtime Florida photog and friend Steve Gruenwald tipped me off that the driver of the Jim and Alison Lee car was going to be Art Marshall, whom many of you already know has a unique place in our sport's history as the last Top Fuel driver to win an NHRA national event in a front-engine Top Fueler.

Chatting with front-engine-dragster trivia answer Art Marshall, right

After the last cackle had faded, I introduced myself to him, and he seemed genuinely happy that people still knew who he was. Man, how could we forget? I was finally able to get the answer to whose ex-Hot Wheels dragster he was driving to win that event — I've been told, read, and probably even written that it was Don Prudhomme's car and that it was Tom McEwen's nearly identical car — but he told me flat out that it was the ex-Prudhomme car, so that should put that little mystery to rest. I got his number and will follow up about that event win, which has a good story beyond the front-engine angle. It's something I've always been interested in, and meeting him was just a matter of good, well, you know.

The time change may have kicked my butt Sunday morning, but it saved my ass Monday morning. I almost always use my cell-phone alarm or the in-room alarm clock as a wake-up instead of relying on the front desk, but the in-room clocks at the hotel do not auto adjust, and with the time change taking place at 2 a.m. and no way to check to make sure that my cell phone would automatically adjust (I know they're supposed to, but I'm paranoid), I decided to cover all bases by setting a wake-up call anyway for Sunday morning and authorizing the system to keep it for the duration of my stay.

Well, I'm not sure what happened, but the Sunday call never came (!), but the old LG Dare woke me up with a noisy rattle, and all was good. That night, I set the phone's alarm to wake me at 6:30 a.m. for the drive up to Jacksonville. I also had asked Little Brad to text me, regardless of time, when he had e-mailed me his new Monday Morning Crew Chief column so that I could post it before heading out at 7. Apparently, though, when I opened one eye to read his early-morning text, I must have turned off the phone alarm. The next thing I know, the room phone is ringing, and it's just before 7 a.m. Man, I hate it when that happens.

I set a new world record for a shave and shower, tossed all of the remaining stuff in the suitcase, and played the computer keyboard like a virtuoso pianist to get Brad's column ready for your enjoyment. By the time I hit the parking lot, it was after 7:30.

You see more brake lights driving through Waldo than you would at a weekend full of bracket racing. No one (except John Force) speeds in Waldo.

As I laid out earlier, this part of town is not exactly conducive to making up for lost time, and a heavy, heavy fog that at times limited visibility to 50 feet didn't help. I crept along as wearily as I could, even occasionally nudging the needle north of the limit. On the morning-drive radio, the talk was about how John Force got a ticket earlier in the week in Waldo, which sits at the intersection of 301 and 24 and solidly in the Police Officer Speed Ticket Writing Hall of Fame. The place is notorious for its enforcement — “stringent” would be a pretty good understatement. Force couldn’t talk his way out of a ticket and quipped that the officer told him that they even ticket people for driving too fast in the McDonald's drive-thru (in the spirit of fair reporting, there's no McDonald's in Waldo).

Sure enough, as I poked my way through town at a speed that easily could have been bested by a 10-year-old on a skateboard, at the far edge of town, ol' Johnny Law had another victim pulled over. It was foggy all the way until 301 hit Interstate 10, and then it magically lifted, as if saying, "OK kid, you made it through the darkest spot."

I had had visions of trying to change my flight to avoid the long layover, but the only connecting flight leaving DFW for Ontario gave me just a 20-minute window, and the ticket agent not only told me I would never make it, but also refused to let me take that gamble. Sitting at the gate a few minutes later, when they announced that our flight was delayed, I was glad that I had heeded her advice. Good timing, I think.

The captain apologized and said that we'd probably land in Dallas 35 to 40 minutes late, and with a five-hour layover awaiting, it was the first time that I had ever greeted news like that with a yawn. It was bad news for fellow NHRA travelers Steve Gibbs and Dana Mariotti, whose layover already was a short one, and suddenly it looked as if I might have company during my extended stay. Well, apparently, the Good Pilot had the hammer seriously down and the nitrous spraying because we actually arrived at the gate three minutes ahead of the original schedule. It's easy to make up time when there's no law with radar guns in the sky.

So I grabbed a burger at Chili's, fired up Ol' Lappy, and started writing. Now that I'm done, I'm going to dive back into my latest read, Don Garlits and His Cars, which is a fascinating recount by the man himself of the construction, sometimes demise, and re-creations/resurrections of his many Swamp Rats that goes far beyond what he has posted on his website. I thought I knew Swamp Rat history pretty well, but I've already learned a lot just halfway through. In fact, unless something else comes up, for Friday's column, I'm going to try to put together a Swamp Rat cheat sheet for you.

I'll certainly not be delivering but a fraction of the good info in this book, which I'm going to review, along with the new Tommy Ivo, Chrisman family, and Mickey Thompson books that I've been power-reading the last few weeks.

Well, I sense that the timing is right for a Diet Coke break, then back into the "Big Daddy" book. I'll see you Friday … unless I forget to set my alarm.