I'm not much on parades.

Never have been.

They just seem like a pointless exercise to me -- a bunch of people with an over-inflated sense of self riding down the street waving at folks they don't know, who don't know them.

So when Charles Hudson, public relations director at the Rockingham Speedway, asked me to be in the ARCA hauler parade Friday afternoon in conjunction with this weekend's ARCA/Remax Carolina 200, I was a little skeptical considering my strong anti-parade stance.

But in the end, I figured what the heck, it's not every day that you get to ride in a big ol' race car hauler.

Good choice on my part.

People always ask me why I like racing and hanging out at tracks. My answer is always the same: You meet some of the coolest people at the racetrack. It seems that everybody has a great story.

"Tinman" was no different.

Bloomington, Minn. native Mike "Tinman" Volgerson is the transportation director for Eddie Sharp Racing (ESR) in Denver, N.C. He is also a fabricator at the shop. Oh yeah, he is also the hauler driver for the ESR Ruby Tuesday No. 2 Toyota Camry driven by Tim George in the ARCA Series and was who I was matched up with for the parade through the Rockingham and Hamlet countryside.

As I gathered all my reporter-phernalia and climbed into his rig, I was greeted with the aroma of an Artura Fuente Esposito cigar, a handshake and a, "Hey, I'm Tinman because I'm a cold, heartless bastard." Of course it was all tempered with a big smile, so I figured I was all right.

For the next two hours as we made our way down N.C. 177, through Rockingham and back to the track on U.S. 1 to wait to get in the garage area, we talked racing and I found out that ol' Tinman has been around the block a time or two. He said his pit crew days are behind him but in his day he did everything over-the-wall short of carrying tires, including a stint as the gas man for Kevin Lepage in Cup a few years back. We bemoaned the state of NASCAR these days with the new car, the chase and "tracks that if you don't look at the sign on your way in, you don't know where you are," between horn blasts at the people along the parade route.

"I need a new horn on this rig," Tinman told me as we passed Richmond Senior High. "One of the guys has a train horn on his. This one won't wake anyone up at night," Tinman said.

"A lot of the guys don't like these parades. But I love 'em. This is a brand new trailer. I just picked it up on Tuesday from the decal shop. I have been looking forward (to showing it off)."

When the parade was over and we got back to the track, Tinman insisted that I hang out with him until UARA practice ended and we could get the hauler into the garage area. I have been around a lot of amazing feats of driving and, while Tinman doesn't look like any race car driver I've ever seen, getting that big hauler onto the track and into its parking slot in the garage ranks high on my list of driving feats.

I've been in a number or race cars and done some crazy stuff in my life, but coming down the 24 degree banking on the track was one of the scarier things I have experienced in my life

"Oh, that's nothing," Tinman assured me. "Getting in and out of Bristol is the trick."

Nothing but one of the many things I learned from Tinman that reaffirmed my love of racing.