I know that everyone has been anxiously awaiting my report from Germany so here we go. I've got a lot to tell you so please make sure you read both sections!

I can tell you that being out of the country for a few days made me homesick. I can only imagine how our troops cope with being gone for a year or more. That is why it is so important for us to bring a little bit of home to our troops wherever they are. Our motto during our trip was "since you couldn’t come to the races to see us, we decided to come to Germany to visit you!"

For those of you that don’t know, I left for Germany Saturday, November 25, after a great Thanksgiving holiday with my family. I flew from BWI to Detroit where I met up with the rest of the team, boarded a flight to Frankfurt, Germany, and arrived there about 7 a.m. Sunday ready to go. You have to understand one thing, when we arrived in Germany, we were on a mission. We planned to work 16 hours a day and visit as many men and women as we could until they made us go home.

This year our team consisted of Warren Johnson, Cory McClenathan, Tommy Johnson, Jr., Melanie Troxel, and me. Of course you can’t forget Fred Simmonds and Jeff Romack from GM Motorsports. Fred is the driving force behind this entire project and it has been an honor for me to be involved in such a worthwhile cause. But Fred couldn’t do it without a lot of help. When we got to Germany, there were 50 boxes of "goodie bags" waiting for us that Fred had shipped over in advance. These bags were full of T-shirts, hats, cars, pictures, stickers, and all sorts of other racing memorabilia that had been donated by great companies such as Summit, Jegs, Red Line Oil, Skull Gear, GM Performance Parts, and US Tobacco.

I wish you could have seen the smiles on the faces of our troops and their loved ones when we handed them a goodie bag and said thanks for all you do for us. By the time we signed our last autograph at about 7 p.m. Tuesday, we had handed out our very last goodie bag to the last person in line. Talk about great planning. We passed out over 1,500 bags in 60 hours and had it planned right down to the last bag. Sometimes you have to be lucky and good. Great job Fred!

Well, now you know how our trip started and finished. Let’s talk about all of the cool stuff we saw and did while we were there. When we arrived at the airport in Frankfurt, there was a specially decorated bus waiting just for us. This would be our transportation for the next three days and it totally captured the racing theme of our trip. At times the bus was so packed with boxes of goodie bags that we had trouble finding a place to sit.

The ride from Frankfurt to Ramstein Air Base took about 90 minutes and it allowed me to adapt to the fact that we were no longer in the United States. We traveled on the autobahn and cars were passing us at about 90 mph. Well, that is kind of like driving on Interstate 95 right? But seriously, between the highways, the signs (which I still can’t read) and the scenery I definitely realized I wasn't in Kansas anymore. The countryside was beautiful and would have reminded you of the Shenandoah Valley in the fall.