"Road Trips" by The Old Squid
"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the
Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you may be
swept off to."
Bilbo Baggins
Monterey 2003, Part 6
A Day at the Races
posted 12/05/03
Have you ever introduced a very important person to one of your hobbies and had that walking on eggs feeling wondering what they would think? That was the feeling I had as my Fearless Wife and I rolled into the parking lot at the motel in Monterey. This was a big trip, big expense, and one I'd enjoyed the previous two years without her. While she's always liked our motorcycle vacations through deserts and mountains, this was a different experience. This was going to be urban, action filled, crowded with people, noisy!
The first order of business was to unpack at the room. Actually, this is a suite of two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, and living room. A small apartment really. In the past this has worked well for the island mob.
This year we would have two couples and two other guys for a different mix. No more running around in our underwear leaving the toilet lid up! No more "shopping" for food at the liquor store across the street. Well, change is good…so they say.
As I put things away, I realized how odd it felt showing my wife were everything was at. I turned the fridge down so as to not freeze the pop and checked for extra towels. All issues we'd dealt with in previous years. It felt like I'd lived here before. At one point she gave me an odd look like "How the hell do you know this place so well?" Then she realized that I'd spent half a month in the same room over previous years.
We did a little sightseeing and visited old Friday Harbor friends who had moved to the Monterey area and then we all got together for dinner and I looked at the familiar faces and said, "You mean I just rode 1500 miles to have dinner with you guys…again?"
Sunday we got an early start to take in all the sights at the racetrack. Laguna is spread out over a couple of square miles and to walk from one area to another you have to take some round about routes.
We visited the vendors and the pits first. My fearless wife sat in a racecar operated by one of the driving schools and I had my fantasy about sending her to racecar driving school while I went to motorcycle racing school. I thought that the car looked good on her.
She enjoyed some of the endless vendors and was intrigued by a booth sponsoring women who race. We bought one of their fundraising calendars, as it's not often that I can get pictures of attractive women WITH my wife's approval! When the racer women found out that we had ridden all the way from Washington State they were very nice to us and autographed their pictures for us. This whole phenomenon of women riders isn't a new one but they seem to be a growing and more accepted piece of the scene and it's a topic that I'll explore in a later story.
We watched the races from several locations around the track. One of the most exciting was at the top of the hill that dominates the track. The course comes up a hill on a straightaway and then, right at the crest plunges down a blind left hand corner. The racers can't see what's ahead and have to drive on faith here. This corner is called the corkscrew and its one of the best known in all the world's circuits. The bikes break over the top at around 70mph, lay over hard to the left and then immediately to their right as they accelerate down the hill. By the time they hit the lower part of the hill, they are going 120 and the view from under the oak trees along the course is fabulous.
For the finish, we sat in the stands and watched the bikes start on the diamond vision screen across the track. It was odd to see them on TV and hear them in the distance and then to have them suddenly flash by right in front of us. I must say that the best view of a race is on TV but the only way to experience the visceral sound and smell is from the stands or along the track. A little of both during a year is a good compromise.
The races blasted along and suddenly I realized that I didn't need to worry about my wife enjoying the scene. She was yelling for Ben Bostrom (that's his bike pictured at the top of the page) and following the competition better than most. I stopped and looked around at this scene of screaming fans and high-speed machines and realized how unique this is to this time in history. As definitive as chariot races to the Romans or jousting to the Middle Ages, hydrocarbon powered racers came into existence at the beginning of the last century and probably won't last past the end of this one. There will be something else to define the next moment. Alcohol? Electric? Something not yet invented or incubating now in our culture. I don't care. I'm a product of this time and I'll enjoy it as the unique experience that it is.
The next day we packed and headed out. We went by ourselves, just like we came. We found heat aplenty. Other tourists on bikes, truckers, and families. We were part of the migration that humanity started out of Africa a few hundred thousand years ago. On that long journey, first we walked. Then we invented roads and a few thousand years ago, the wheel. Things sped up! Only 150 years ago we invented the internal combustion engine. For better or for worse, it's part of our heritage and as I drove up the long interstate home, I did my best to understand better and appreciate this trip. I have past relatives that came out to the west in a covered wagon on the Oregon Trail. Future relatives may journey to the stars on columns of fire. As for me, I'll just enjoy my Road Trips.
The Old Squid
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