Conor Daly – The Trip to England

Croydon, England (October 12, 2008) – Our trip to England has started off great! Josef’s flight from Tennessee and mine from Indianapolis arrived in Chicago at almost the exact same time so that was a convenient start. We met at our gate to go to London but we had about three hours of time to kill.

Josef and I were looking around for power outlets to plug in our phones and laptops. There were almost no outlets in the whole airport which was very frustrating but we finally found one next to the gate for a San Diego flight, so we sat down there. The outlet turned out to be broken but something interesting happened next. I looked up from what I was doing and kind of did a double take because I thought I had seen the famous skateboarder Tony Hawk!

I looked at Josef and asked him if he thought it was him, and I was fairly sure it was. We were both in awe of how cool it was to see him there! I told Josef we should go get pictures with him. So we went up and I asked him if we could get pictures with him and he was very nice and said, “Yeah, sure!” We actually got to talking about why Josef and I were going to England. We said we were going to race cars as a part of the Team USA Scholarship and he thought that was very cool.

So Josef and I boarded the plane to London and we were fortunately sitting together. The flight was pretty uneventful. We watched a couple movies that the airline provided and then basically slept the rest of the way. It was a seven-hour flight but overall it wasn’t bad.

Cliff Dempsey picked us up at the airport and we went straight to the Ray factory. When we arrived we met Bob, who was working on my car, Francis, who was working on Josef’s car, and Gavin Ray, who builds the chassis. The day also had a fun twist to it! There were many people starting to gather right outside the factory on the street. There were all sorts of superbikes, performance cars and little motor scooters. All the people with two-wheeled machines were performing stunts and just riding really fast! They were at it almost the whole day doing street drag races with cars, the motorcycle stunts, and even some drifting! Josef and I had a great time watching it all. We are now just resting in our hotel room and hopefully going to get some dinner soon. We had a great time today and it’s only the first day here!