A trip to Daytona with the VP aboard Air Force Two

	Vice President Dick Cheney didn't have to worry about parking for the Pepsi 400 as his traveling party pulled right onto the track at Daytona. Al Tielemans/SI

By Lars Anderson, SI.com

The motorcade cruised down the blacktop toward Turn 3 of Daytona International Speedway, the procession of SUVs rolling through the track as fans looked on intently. Like the stock cars that would be drafting off one another in just a few hours in the Pepsi 400, the SUVs were in a line as they motored at about 40 miles per hour with their lights flashing red and blue.

In one of the lead black Suburbans sat the Vice President of the United States, who was attending the race with his wife and three grandchildren. I was about 10 cars back in another SUV, crammed in with the pool of a half-dozen White House reporters who were shadowing the Vice President for the day.

In the 11 hours I spent traveling with the Vice President on July 1, some things were surprising, some disappointing and some revealing. Here's an hour-by-hour account of my day.

10:40 a.m. ET: Sports Illustrated photographer Al Tielemans and I arrive at Andrews Air Force Base in Prince George's County, Md. We make our way through two security checkpoints and are given directions to Air Force Two, the plane the Vice President files on. But two beret-wearing guards who look a little like the pair of female MPs in the movie Stripes stop us. They ask us to pull over and wait for the canine unit to come inspect our vehicle for explosive devices.

As we wait to be searched, I tell Al that four days earlier I'd received an out-of-the-blue message on my voice mail from the Vice President's office, asking me to call them back. At the time I was in Rosemary Beach, Fla., with my wife, who was overseeing a photo shoot for Southern Living magazine. When I told her that someone saying she was from the Vice President's office called, we figured it was either someone from Sports Illustrated or Time Inc. or maybe NASCAR.

I dialed the number that was left for me, and when a young woman answered I explained who I was and why I was calling. She asked me for my cell phone number, which I gave her. Then she said someone would call me back and she hung up.

Seconds later, one of the Vice President's aides phoned and wanted to know if I was interested in tagging along with Dick Cheney on his upcoming trip to Florida. The Vice President and his staff were first going to fly from Andrews to Cape Canaveral to witness the launching of the space shuttle. Then they were going to attend the Pepsi 400 at Daytona before flying back to D.C.

I was flattered, and after getting approval from my editors in New York, I told the VP's office that we were all-systems-go. I then got an e-mail from Cheney's people asking me for my Social Security number, my date of birth and my credit-card number.

At that point, I was so amped to have the opportunity to join the VP that I didn't think twice about e-mailing my credit-card information to the office of the Vice President. I'd read in one of the documents I had to fill out that the credit-card number would be used to "bill your organization for the cost of the trip," but how much could that be? I mean, I've flown on Tony Stewart's private jet several times for stories, and Stewart has never charged me a cent.