I am sitting here in my lounge in rainy Seattle and was just updating my mileage book for the past couple of weeks. I just calculated that I have driven over 2,840 “trouble-free miles” since leaving Bristol, Tenn., on July 9th and I’m here to tell you that’s a lot of driving. We have, however, been able to see a lot of beautiful country and Toni has been snapping pictures along the way.

I guess you could say that we had an “ok” race in Denver. The mountain, once again, threw us a couple of curve balls during qualifying and we ended up qualifying in the bottom half of the field, which means no lane choice. So, as the saying goes, the rest is history. We packed up our trailer and prepared for the next stage of our journey.

We usually try to break up the 1,400 mile trip to Seattle into two days, so early Monday morning we headed from Denver, through Wyoming and on to Billings, Mont., which is a pretty easy 569-mile drive. On our second day we had 706 miles to go to Ellensburg, Wash., which takes us through the rest of Montana, Idaho, and then Washington. The mountains and scenery are beautiful but I think I would enjoy them a lot more from the passenger seat!

We left Ellensburg Wednesday morning and drove the final 100 miles to the Seattle racetrack. We had been following the weather and the threat of rain has been looming on the horizon and before we left Ellensburg, the first drops starting falling.

We had to cross one more mountain range before getting to the racetrack and the clouds were just hanging between the mountains making for some awesome pictures. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much time to enjoy the breathtaking scenery because I was soon driving in it – rain, fog, and all. Luckily, it was a pretty quick trip to the track.

It looks like there have been a lot of improvements made to the track here in Seattle including some newly paved pit areas. However, it took NHRA a while to figure out where to put all of us so we sat in line at the end of the racetrack and on the return road for a couple of hours before finally getting to our spot, and yes it was still raining.

Well, we are hoping that Mother Nature will cooperate with us this weekend so we can get this race completed. It is raining this afternoon and the weather still looks a little threatening for tomorrow but the rest of the weekend looks ok. I will try to write again when we start our travels to Sonoma next week. Keep your fingers crossed for a rain-free weekend!