Once in the pickup they headed for the airport, but not before stopping at the first store for food. "We ate everything in the house-soup, cold spaghetti, stale chips-everything, and we ran out of food," Labonte says.
Finally, Labonte arrived home in Thomasville, North Carolina. "I walked in the house, and the news was on television," he says. "The guy was talking about rationing water in Greensboro. Just for a split second I wondered if maybe we'd been to another planet."
Benny Phillips lives in High Point, North Carolina, and has covered stock car racing for nearly 40 years.