Oilpressure

I am hopeful that everyone had a safe and restful Independence Day. I took off Monday and had a nice and peaceful four-day weekend of doing nothing. After being on the road and attending race (or race-related) weekends for five of seven weekends from April through June – we needed a long weekend to rest up.

This is probably unnecessary to even mention, much less write an entire post about it. In fact, most you probably couldn’t care less about it, but Susan and I have decided to make one change to our planned racing schedule that I wrote about back in mid-March. For a variety of reasons, we are no longer planning to attend the Honda Indy Toronto in a couple of weeks.

There are many reasons, but none include Susan’s health. Friday will be the three-year mark for when Susan was officially diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. After an initial prognosis on July 7, 2020 that gave her 10 to 12 months to live; I am happy to say that three years later, her health is probably as good as it has been since she was diagnosed. After chemo, surgery then radiation – she is still scanning cancer-free, and her doctors have moved her from scanning every three months to every six months.

There are two main reasons we are not going to Toronto. First of all, effective July 1 – I started taking on a lot more responsibility for my day job. I really didn’t need to move into a newer and bigger role, and take off for more than a week less than two weeks later. Until things get settled, my day job will need my full attention – since it’s the one that actually pays me, instead of costing us money.

I work in the contract world, and our contract was up June 30. For a while in early June, I wasn’t so sure my company would retain our contract. If that ended up being the case, I had no assurances that the new company would pick me up, since I am now pushing 65. If that was the case, I was wondering if I may be donning a blue vest, saying “Welcome to Walmart”. I can’t afford to retire just yet, not for at least a couple of more years anyway.

Not only did my company retain the contract, the new (up to) four-year deal picked up another whole area for us that you-know-who (me) gets to cover. I probably won’t see the end of that contract. I have an idea I’ll probably retire from work in another three years – possibly two, depending on what all is going on.

Speaking of money, that’s the other reason we aren’t going. When Susan was working before her diagnosis, she traveled a lot throughout each week. As you can imagine, she built up a lot of points among three top hotel chains – IHG, Marriott and Choice Hotels. Although she has not worked that job in the past three years, we were still using those points to travel to races. We knew those points would eventually dry up, and we have almost reached that point. Not yet, but they are dwindling.

We had planned to drive to Toronto. We were going to leave Nashville on Wednesday July 12 and drive to Buffalo. It’s really not as far as it sounds. Susan has never been to Niagara Falls, so we were going to leave Buffalo at a decent hour, cross the border and take in the falls on the Canadian side. The Canadian falls are much more spectacular than those on the American side. Then we would drive on into Toronto that afternoon. We were going to do Friday through Sunday at the track, then see Toronto on Monday before driving all the way back to Nashville on Tuesday. That trip would’ve burned up a lot of hotel points, so combining that with my increased workload – we thought we would sit it out. As the schedule turns out, we will be sitting out the entire month of July, and watching all of the July races from home.

I am disappointed; because Toronto is a race we have never been to. I was able to pick up at least one track this year I had never been to before – Texas, in early April.

So far this season, I’ve been to Texas and the IMS Open Test in April by myself. With Susan, we’ve been to Barber, the three weekends at IMS in May and Road America. We still fully intend to go to the Nashville race (of course), the IndyCar portion of the Brickyard weekend and then close out our in-person racing season at Gateway. Counting the Open Test, that’s still ten racing weekends this season, which I guess isn’t too bad. I still have Toronto, Iowa, Mid-Ohio and Long Beach on my to-do list (I never cared for the term bucket list). We may or may not ever make Detroit and/or Portland.

This is probably more information than any of you needed to know, but I know I had listed Toronto as a race we planned to go to. I also know that if we didn’t go, some would jump to the conclusion that the reason we did not go was due to Susan’s health. I’ll assure you that is not the case. If you see her at any of the three August races, you’ll see I’m being completely truthful.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on July 5, 2023 at 4:02 am and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.