August 4
Another miserable sleepless night. I slept about an hour and a half, then was awake for four hours and managed to sleep for another hour before dawn. Yeesh.
For breakfast, I walked to a nice bakery and had a delicious pastry loaded with raspberries. Definitely not allowed on the sugar-free diet!
Ryan and Laura picked me up a bit after 11, and we went to Autoworld. Somehow, I didn’t see it yesterday – it’s where I saw an Elise parked across the square from the military museum. Clearly, I only have eyes for Lotus, and didn’t spot that there was a car museum right there.
Autoworld is the Belgian National Car Museum. Their current pop-up exhibit, called “Big In Japan,” is Japanese cars. Somehow, not one of them was JDM (Japanese domestic market). They were all left-hand drive cars. I was mildly surprised and mildly disappointed. They couldn’t find even one JDM car?
The permanent exhibition is a nice collection of cars. Obviously, the majority of cars are European, so I saw quite a few cars that were entirely new to me. But I have seen other examples of many of the more valuable cars here (the pre-war Bugattis and modern Ferraris, for example). I go to a lot of car shows. They had a 1901 Toledo Steam Car, built by bicycle makers.
Hit the Road
The road to Spa – more correctly, the road to Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps – was pretty crowded the entire way. It was a bit more than an hour and a half of mostly rural expressway. We headed to my hotel so I could get checked in, but nobody was there. My reservation confirmation email said check-in starts at 4 pm and we were early, so we went to the track to get checked in for tomorrow with RSR.
That accomplished, we headed to the grandstands at Raidillon. It’s pretty trippy finally being here. Ryan and I are driving on the second day of a two-day event, so there are cars out running on the track. The weather is beautiful, hopefully it will be this nice tomorrow. Watching the cars blast down the hill from La Source, down to Eau Rouge, vaulting up over Raidillon, and disappearing, full throttle echoing up the Kemmel straight was fantastic.
Back at the hotel, there was still no sign of life. The address in the email said the address was 220, which is a restaurant. All the rooms are at 223 and have keypads on them. I was starting to think I wouldn’t be able to get into my room. I was not yet in full-on panic mode.
I phoned the number listed on their website, but it went straight to voicemail. A moment later, a maintenance guy came out the door of 220. He didn’t speak any English, but understood that I wanted to check in. He made a phone call and got through to someone. After a conversation, he handed me his phone.
The nice lady I talked to told me that my room number and code were in an email. I never received any such email. She told me the room number and code and asked when I wanted breakfast tomorrow. It turns out I’m the only guest in the place. I told her I could do without, but she said she’d have breakfast delivered to my room. What time did I want it? As I needed to be at the track at 8, she suggested 7 am.
Disaster averted. What would I have done if I’d been a few minutes earlier or later and not run into the maintenance guy?
On the phone, she told me the code, but the maintenance guy worked the doors for me. I had a little heartburn that there was some trick I missed.
I had a nice dinner out with Ryan and Laura, another traditional Belgian food: Hawaiian Pizza!
No heartburn at all – not from the pizza, and there was no trick to the hotel code.
