When we planned our activities for this trip, we thought it was a good idea to have a rest day after we arrived in Belize and another rest day before we returned home. I’m not going to say it wasn’t a good plan, but in retrospect, I’d rather have visited another Mayan ruin: Cerros than hung around Consejo. Cerros isn’t far from Corozal, although I’m guessing the roads are not very good.
In any event, Friday was a day of relaxation. This was not a bad thing. You see, I managed to take a trip to the Caribbean and catch a cold. Our second night here, we had a fan running in the bedroom to serve as white noise. I awoke in the early morning with the fan blowing on me. I had a bit of a scratchy throat. I was thinking this was because the fan had dried me out. I was thinking incorrectly.
Half a lifetime ago, every time I flew on a plane, I caught a cold. I’d take vacations in Phoenix and spend the whole time sitting in the sun in my parents’ backyard, sniffling and sneezing. Sometimes, I’d get back home after the vacation and take a couple of sick days. I flew to Louisville, KY, for work once and had a miserable cold. The hotel was full of military personnel for some reason. It was when Operation Desert Shield turned into Operation Desert Storm. I slept through most of the war, although I could occasionally hear the cheering of the military guests. Catching a cold every time I flew was beyond annoying.
Luckily, when I started travelling every week for work, I was no longer catching colds on every flight. I don’t know why the godz decided to remind me of that history and knock me down with a cold on this trip, but so it goes. I was mostly functional during the day, although some days I could hardly talk. When we’d get back to Greg’s, though, I’d relax and try to take a nap.
So a relaxing Friday wasn’t a bad thing.
One of Greg’s neighbors
Strange rash
A cold isn’t the only thing I picked up in Belize. By Friday, I had a rash of some sort on both forearms. Nowhere else, and not under my watch. If it was from the sun, why only on my arms? If it was from the sunscreen, again, why only on my arms? I never did figure it out; the rash was gone a couple of days after returning home, before I recovered from the cold.
February 21
When we bought our tickets, the original return flight was to change planes in Houston Hobby. It was a nice surprise that, a few weeks before we left, Southwest notified us that they’d changed us to a direct flight. It makes for an easier day for us, but I’d never been to Hobby before, and that would have been the 57th airport I’ve travelled to/from/through.
Greg said somebody told him that there were 85 speed bumps between his place and the airport. That seemed like a reasonable number, but it didn’t stop us from counting them. Our tally could be off by one in either direction, but we counted 74.
Returning the rental car was quick and easy compared to picking it up. We were quite early, probably could have waited another hour before leaving Greg’s, but it’s better to be early and have time to kill than to be late and miss our flight.
After we got checked in and dropped off our baggage, we went to the restaurant for lunch. We all had grilled ham and cheese – not exactly traditional Belizean fare. This was one of the few places I could find a sugar-free soft drink. Nobody had “diet” anything; a couple of places had Coke Zero, and a couple of places had unsweetened iced tea. I don’t normally consume alcohol when I’m feeling poorly, but when I couldn’t get a sugar-free soft drink, I resorted to beer. Done with lunch, we headed to our gate.
I hadn’t given much thought to how the gates work in an airport with no jetways. We were at gate 6, way at the end. (One tactic Southwest uses to keep costs low is to rent the gates and baggage carousels that are the farthest away. The rent on those is lower.) We weren’t the only people who were early. There are maybe 80 seats at gate 6, with similar numbers at the other gates. A 737 has something like 180 seats, so if the only people waiting here were for our flight, there’d be a bunch of people standing around.
From the flight status monitors, I saw that there was a flight leaving from gate 6 before ours, and there looked to be two flights’ worth of people at gate 5, too. Out the door at gate 6, we could see a plane. It was a different airline than any of the flights leaving from gates 5 and 6. It was then that I realized that the planes just come in and park at any gate, and departing passengers are led out the doors at their gate and ushered to wherever they need to go. So the folks getting on the plane at gate 6 could be coming from any gate, and when we walked out, we’d be marched to a plane anywhere in the line.
Our flight was on time and uneventful.
It was a good trip. We hadn’t seen Greg for ages, and it might be some time before we see him again. We thoroughly enjoyed all of our excursions, and the weather was nice.
That said, I found Belize a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. I’m a desert boy. Denver isn’t exactly desert, but it’s dry here, and I’m not a big fan of high humidity. The temperature in Belize was within a degree or two of 80 for our entire stay, with high humidity. I looked forward to a shower each day, but within minutes of getting out of the shower, I found myself thinking, “I’d really like a shower!” I lived in South Florida for a bit less than a year and never did get accustomed to the humidity.
For me, today was the highlight of the trip, the thing I was most looking forward to: a visit to a significant Maya site. Genae had done the trip planning for everything else, but today was Greg’s idea. I think he nailed it.
There is a road to Lamanai, but we’re told you’d have to be a masochist to use it. Instead, we signed on to a tour with Lamanai Eco Tours. They can be a bit difficult to find, so we were directed to look for signs for Bat’s Landing, a bar and grille, a few miles from Orange Walk. From there, we’d take a 22-mile boat ride up the New River to the site.
In our travels around Belize up to now, we’ve passed several police checkpoints but were never stopped. Today, just before we reached Orange Walk, we finally passed through an active checkpoint. We were flagged down, and I was asked where I’m from. “Colorado, USA,” I answered. He asked for my driver’s license. He inspected it closely, but I doubt he’d know a valid Colorado driver’s license from a fake one. He read out my name, and I answered that, yes, that was my name. “Go ahead,” he said.
On the trip to the site, our boat captain stopped several times to point out some of the local wildlife. I found this quite impressive. First, the river is a maze of islands and tributaries. Once we were going, the captain would open the throttle all the way, lifting the nose of the boat, throwing lots of spray, and leaving a big wake. Then he’d spot something, throttle down, and nose the boat toward one shore or the other. He’d get his laser pointer out and show us where a turtle or crocodile or iguana or tree full of bats was. I reckon we were going about 22 knots at full throttle. The crocodile he spotted had just its nostrils and eyes above the water. The turtle was just as hard to spot. I can believe that the bats rested regularly in the same tree, but I doubt he was finding the other animals in the same places. Very impressive wildlife spotting skills, for sure.
It took us a bit more than an hour to get from Bat’s Landing to Lamanai.
On shore, we were handed off to a new guide. I didn’t get his name, but he told me he’s been a guide at Lamanai for 23 years. He was most knowledgeable about the ruins. Although I didn’t spot any archaeologists working, it is an active site, with one structure being reclaimed from the jungle only in the last seven months.
We were told that “Lamanai” means “submerged crocodile.” Our guide told us that that’s a bit of a mis-translation. He said it’s actually “Lama’anayin” and means something like “squashed bug”. I don’t recall exactly what he said, so I probably have it wrong. I haven’t been able to verify it one way or another.
As is common with Mayan ruins, the structures were built up over centuries: Postclassic structures were built on top of Classic ones, which were built on Preclassic. The Preclassic structures in Lamanai may also have been built atop Archaic ones, but that wasn’t clear to me. The faces at Mask Temple all have Olmec features. The Olmecs predated the Maya, and “disappeared” about 400 BCE. I put “disappeared” in quotes because the Maya people are still here, post-Conquest, just as I’d guess the Olmec were still around when the Maya gained power.
We toured the major structures – the Jaguar Temple, the Ball Court, the High Temple (“El Castillo”, but not to be confused with El Castillo at Chichen Itza), and the Mask Temple. I was most surprised by the Ball Court. The one at Chichen Itza is the largest ball court in the Mayan empire, much bigger than a football field. The one here is… not playable? It’s only about ten feet wide and thirty feet long and has a round stone dais in the middle of it.
I was glad that we tourists are still allowed to climb on the pyramids. We were lucky enough to do this at Chichen Itza 32 years ago, but they no longer allow it. Here, the High Temple even has a modern set of stairs built on it.
Our guide at one point called out a major difference between Chichen Itza: the water situation. Chichen Itza is on the Yucatan Peninsula, which has no surface water. That is, there are no lakes or rivers there. Their water sources were “cenotes”, which are large sinkholes. In dry times, the cenotes were under threat of failing to meet the needs of the city. Lamanai is built on the shores of a lake, and water was never a problem. At Chichen Itza, they had human sacrifices to appease the gods to supply water. There were no human sacrifices at Lamanai.
Here is a little history of Lamanai, from The Maya, by Michael D. Coe:
Far up the New River, a considerable distance to the southwest of Cerros, is the important site of Lamanai (known as ‘Indian Church’ on older maps of Belize), which has been excavated by David M. Pendergast of the Royal Ontario Museum during a series of field seasons beginning in 1974. Lamanai lies on a long lake formed by the river, and its 718 mapped structures are stretched out in strip form along its shore. There is even an ancient harbor in the northern part of the site, testifying to its entrepreneurial importance in the regulation of ancient Maya trade. While it was occupied from earliest times right into the post-Conquest period, much of its importance lies in the large, imposing, Late Preclassic temple-pyramids which usually underlie Early Classic constructions, including one with a plaster-work mask closely resembling those from Cerros.
Between AD 672 and 751 (considered by many to mark the civilization’s florescence), the number of communities carving new monuments continued to increase, but new construction took place only in already established cities. Maya civilization had ceased to expand geographically. From 751 to about 790, long-standing alliances began to break down, interstate trade declined, and conflicts between neighboring city-states increased (the battle of 792 commemorated by the Bonampak murals illustrates this situation). From 790 to 830, the death rate of cities outstripped the birth rate, while after 830 construction stopped throughout the Central Area, with the exception of peripherally located sites like Lamanai. The katun ending date 10.3.0.0.0 (AD 889) was celebrated by inscriptions at only three sites. And the very last Long Count date to be recorded anywhere was the katun ending 10.4.0.0.0 (AD 909), incised on a jade from a site in southern Quintana Roo.
I can’t help but recall a conversation I had with a couple of Dutch motorcyclists in the parking lot of my hotel in Nürburg last summer. I don’t recall how it came up, but they said something to the effect that “there’s no history in America”. It’s a common misconception, I think. There is quite a bit of history here between the Aztecs, Maya, and Inca, all of whom left major monuments, many of which predate Christ. But it’s not European history, and due to several factors, not as easily understood.
The Maya never developed paper, so all their history is documented in the stone of their temples or the jade of their jewelry. The temples were consumed by the jungle, and the Europeans looted the jade, which is now in museums or private collections worldwide. Even if the Maya had come up with paper, how long would any document have lasted in this climate?
This lack of a “written word” goes hand-in-hand with some other “failures” of Mayan technology. They never came up with the wheel. How primitive! But in this tropical, swampy environment, the wheel is worse than useless. It’s much easier to move building materials on poles carried by men. Any wheeled vehicle would bog down. They certainly had the concept of the wheel, though. In other cultures, the wheel is typically associated (right or wrong) with the arch and the dome. The Maya had arches, but they weren’t curved arches. You can mock up a Mayan arch using Lego blocks. The Maya did have domes, though. There’s the Observatory at Chichen Itza, for example.
The wheel also shows up in the Mayan calendar. Compared to the Maya, the Romans were downright backward when it came to understanding the calendar. The Romans kept having to adjust their calendar every several years because the months kept drifting – months are based on the moon, years on the sun.
The Romans also never came up with the concept of zero. Without a zero, large numbers are difficult to represent, and you can’t perform advanced calculations.
I’m not going to say that the Maya, Inca, and Aztecs didn’t fight wars (the excerpts above call some of them out), but I think there’s a definite difference between American history, pre-Conquest, and the Old World. When Europeans came to America, they brought disease, enslavement, genocide, and theft on a continental scale. It would be nice if Europeans (and those of us of European descent) were less proud of that history and more curious about the indigenous people of the Americas.
Jaguar Temple
Ball Court
High Temple (“El Castillo”)
Mask Temple
In front of the giant Olmec mask
The temples are connected with wide limestone gravel paths. Our guide pointed out that the path we were walking on was a narrower version of the original Mayan road. The new path was edged in stone. A few feet on either side of the new path was another set of boundary stones. The old set delineated the ancient Mayan road. I won’t say that these Mayan roads are as robust as ancient Roman roads, but the jungle is a much harsher environment than central Italy or rural England.
Early on the tour, the path took us beneath a large tree. The guide pointed to the upper branches where a group of howler monkeys was sleeping. A few steps later, we came upon a red stain on the path. Some predator had gotten one of the monkeys last night or the night before, and this was a blood stain.
After walking through the site and climbing on the pyramids, we gathered for a lunch of chicken and rice and beans, then went through the gift shops, where I found a shirt that could pass for an Aloha shirt.
A short while later, our boat came back to pick us up and return us to Bat’s Landing. The return trip was a bit quicker – not stopping to point out any wildlife, the captain kept the throttle wide open the whole time. On both the ride there and back, we were going fast enough that I had to take my cap off. If I didn’t take it off, it would have blown off. Without my cap, I managed to get a minor sunburn on my head. So it goes.
We were back to the car by 2:00 pm and had an uneventful, police-free drive back to Corozal.
I love visiting these old ruins and thought the day was a great success.
Breakfast at the hotel was much like you’d expect breakfast to be at any Ramada Inn stateside, but with a slightly different selection of fruit. The sausage was different – instead of patties or links, it looked like sliced-up hot dogs. I sampled it; it wasn’t hot dogs, but I can’t say for sure exactly what it was.
Genae found out that the Museum of Belize was nearby. We didn’t know if it was open yet, so we asked the hotel’s concierge. She said it was open and that we could get there on foot or by taxi. Instead, we drove. Yes, we could have walked it, but the roads are narrow and not particularly well set up for pedestrians.
The building the museum is in was built more than a century and a half ago by the British colonial government as a prison. The prison was shut down not long after independence, and in about 2002 was made into a museum chronicling about 3,000 years of history. It hosts a rich assembly of Mayan ceremonial objects, carvings, paintings, and other cultural artifacts. The story of slavery is told – loggers who braved malarial swamps and often tried to find freedom in Guatemala – and emancipation 15 years before our Civil War.
There are exhibits of the region’s animals. Each stuffed animal is accompanied by a sign telling visitors how the animal came to be here: killed by a vehicle, or died of old age. Animals aren’t represented only through taxidermy; there are some beautiful paintings and photographs. One exhibit tells about the destruction caused by Hurricane Hattie, which struck Belize in 1961. It was this hurricane that caused the capital to be moved inland to Belmopan.
Ex-prison
Mayan numbering – they had a zero!
Not Toucan Sam (Froot-Loops)
Our museum craving satisfied, we hit the road and headed to the zoo.
I’ll admit that I’m not the biggest fan of zoos. They always feel a bit wrong to me. Yes, it’s nice to be able to see these creatures, but they’re in jail! The Belize Zoo is a not-for-profit organization founded by Sharon Matola in 1983, who was caring for a handful of wild animals that had been part of a natural history documentary. When filming was completed, she was left with these animals and decided to start a zoo. The animals here are rescued, confiscated from the illegal wildlife trade, or transferred from other rehab facilities. Most of the exhibits have signs telling visitors how they came to be here.
When we were looking at the spider monkeys, a tour guide came up onto the platform leading a small group. Once the monkeys spotted her, they came running up to the fence. She tossed them bits of food, at first on their side of the fence, then on our side of the fence, which they could grab with their prehensile tails.
The howler monkeys were all asleep at the top of their tree. A sign said. “Please don’t howl at us, it causes us stress.” I don’t know if they’re nocturnal, but it was fairly hot out, and even many of the diurnal animals were sleeping in the shade.
Tapir
Spider Monkey
Harpy Eagle
American Crocodile
Iguana – a visitor, not a resident
Today’s beer
We had lunch at the restaurant at the zoo, bought some T-shirts, and then headed back to Corozal.
We left Consejo Shores early on our way to the Excalibur Adventure Park to enjoy the Via Ferrata and zip lines. We had 11:00 am reservations and didn’t want to get there late. It’s a bit southwest of Belize City, so we left some extra time.
As we got closer to our destination, the landscape transformed a bit, with small, steep mountains jutting above the otherwise pancake-flat terrain. This was a good sign: I was having trouble imagining zip lines without mountains.
I said earlier that the road signs look just like the ones at home. That isn’t entirely true – the signs warning drivers about the speed bumps were like none I’ve seen anywhere before. Today, we started seeing some new signs. They’re the usual amber diamond signs you’d see to warn you of deer crossing, but they weren’t for deer. Instead, we were warned to watch out for tapir and jaguar crossing the road.
It was only 10 o’clock when we pulled into the parking lot at Excalibur. It looked like we had an hour to kill, but they said we could start our adventure whenever we were ready. We pretty much had the whole place to ourselves.
A via ferrata (“iron path”) is a protected climbing route over mountainous terrain. By “protected,” I mean strapped onto a heavy cable with a carabiner and a device called a “cookie”. The cookie is a squared C-shaped one, with the opening of the C smaller than the cable’s diameter. There’s no way to get the cookie off the cable except at the ends. The carabiner, on the other hand, can be removed from the cable at any time. The cable is attached to the rocks or bridges with a sort of plate. Orient the cookie such that the opening of the C can traverse the plate. At these connecting plates, we have to disconnect the carabiner and reconnect it on the other side. This system makes it impossible to come off the cable, which is reassuring for those of us who have problems with heights.
The original via ferrata was built by units of the Italian army during the First World War and was used to get men and supplies over difficult terrain. They’re now sprouting up all over the place.
This is my first time on one, and I didn’t really know what to expect. On this one, there are five bridges. Some thought went into the design. One bridge tends to bounce up and down when you cross it. Another bridge sways left and right, and another moves backward and forward. Yet another is simply a series of cables criss-crossed, and you need to step where the cables cross. Without the safety gear, I think I could have crossed these bridges, but it would have taken me much longer!
No photography is allowed on either the via ferrata or the zip line. Our guide, Sergio, was kind enough to take some photos. Along the way, he also pointed out some of the interesting plants in the area. One was the gumbo limbo, commonly called the “tourist tree”. The bark has a reddish tinge to it, and it peels off, much like the skin of sunburned tourists. It’s always near a black poisonwood tree. The bark of the gumbo limbo can be used to counteract the effects of the black poisonwood tree. Greg warned us of the poisonwood tree as he had a bad time with it in the jungles around his house. The effect is worse than poison ivy.
When we were putting on our harnesses, before starting off on the via ferrata, Sergio pointed out a coatimundi. The little guy moved too fast for me to get a picture. Oh, well. I’m sure we’ll get another chance to see one tomorrow at the zoo.
The start of the zip line is at the end of the via ferrata. Genae didn’t do the via ferrata with Michael and me, so she joined us here. The first platform is 275′ above sea level (and thus nearly that distance above the ground below). In all, there are five different zip lines that circle through the property, passing over the via ferrata and garden paths below, before ending not far from the start of the via ferrata. It was quite fun.
We ate at the restaurant there, delicious burgers and sandwiches (with buns branded with Excalibur’s logo), fries, and beer.
We didn’t originally sign up for any other activities, but Sergio told us a little about the caves they have there. One is a wet cave that you ride through on innertubes. The other is a short dry cave. We didn’t have our swimsuits with us, so we decided to take the tour through the dry cave.
Sergio told us all about the various formations in the cave – stalagmites, stalactites – and how water comes into the cave during the rainy season. I pointed out the bats that live there, and we even spotted a scorpion spider stalking a cricket. In the middle of the cave, Sergio asked us if we wanted to see total darkness. We turned off our headlamps for a short while. In our modern world, we rarely encounter total darkness. We literally couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces.
There are two short sections of the cave where you have to crawl on hands and knees, and one where you have to slither on your belly. I couldn’t help but wonder how they could politely tell your basic “Walmart shopper” they were too fat to make it through these sections.
Sergio was the first Belizean I’d had any sort of conversation with, more than a simple transaction at the store, anyway. I was expecting his English to be accented much like any other native Spanish speaker I’ve spoken to. But his accent had a bit of a Jamaican lilt to it. I noticed this accent when speaking to other Belizeans. I think I’ll change how I think of this accent – for me, now, it’s not so much a Jamaican accent as a Caribbean one.
Tapir crossing
Jaguar crossing
I can’t draw the sword from the stone…
Via Ferrara bridge
Hanging on the Via Ferrata
The view at the top, ready to zip!
Today’s beer
Bats in the cave
Done with our great time at Excalibur, we hit the road and headed to Belize City. Tomorrow we’re heading to the zoo, and rather than drive all the way back to Consejo, then all the way back here (the zoo isn’t far from Excalibur), we traded a night in a motel for all the driving.
The Ramada Inn, where we stayed, was right on the water. I was guessing half the rooms would have an ocean view, and half would have a “city” view, but all the rooms had ocean views. We didn’t want to tour the city after dark, so we had dinner in the hotel restaurant.
Today we toured the town of Corozal. In the weeks before the trip, when I told people I was going to Belize, everybody asked where we’d be staying. Nobody I talked to had ever heard of Corozal, and gave me blank stares when I told them it was close to Mexico. Undoubtedly, this reaction is natural. Corozal is not at all a tourist mecca.
We’re in Consejo Shores, not Corozal town itself. Consejo is an enclave of Canadian and US expats. It’s about 11 km of bad road northeast of Corozal and only a bit over a mile as the vulture flies from Chetumal, Mexico. Chetumal and Corozal are on the shores of the Caribbean (or Corozal Bay). A peninsula and islands to the east protect the shore from the worst effects of hurricanes and tropical storms, and the water here is too shallow for anything like a cruise ship. The closest tourist attraction is Ambergris Caye. All of Belize’s tourist attractions lie to the south of Belize City, which is a 2.5-hour drive south of Corozal.
Between Belize City and Corozal, the land is pancake flat, planted with sugar cane, palm trees for palm oil, and fruit orchards.
I was surprised to learn of the large presence of Taiwanese. Most of the stores and markets in the area are owned and operated by Taiwanese. Chinese names abound – Deng Shen, for example.
The official language of Belize is English. (The place was called British Honduras until 1981.) Spanish is common, and there’s quite a lot of pidgin English/Spanish – billboards with messages such as “Di Sun Serious!” abound.
There are hundreds of Mayan ruins in the region. I struggle to convey this properly. There are hundreds of sites, with each site ranging from a single structure still overgrown by the jungle to sites spread across hundreds of acres containing dozens of structures that are active archaeological projects.
Greg knew where one of these sites is in the middle of Corozal town. It took us a couple of attempts to find it, missing it by a block this way at first, then by a block that way. When we finally stopped to ask for directions, we were just a couple of hundred feet away, on the other side of a building.
The Santa Rita Archaeological Site is not much larger than a football field. It was first settled some time around 1200 BCE by about 150 people, eventually growing to about 6,800 people and controlling trade along the Rio Hondo river (which today separates Belize from Mexico). People here traded as far south as South America.
My inner 8-year-old couldn’t resist the urge to climb to the top of the pyramid.
We finished the day at a local pizza place. Rather than have another Belikin, I opted for a Landshark, brewed by Margaritaville Caribbean Brewing Company, based in Jacksonville, Florida. It was launched in 2006 by singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett to compete against Grupo Modelo’s Corona. So, yeah, I went to a foreign country to drink a beer from Florida.
We left the house at 7:00 am for our 9:45 flight to Belize City. The fun began when we tried to check our bags. We’re all traveling on the same confirmation number. To begin the process, you need to let the kiosk know who you are. I’m using the Southwest app. You can scan the QR code, supposedly, but that didn’t work. After four or five tries, I gave up and just inserted the credit card I used to buy the tickets. Strike one against the app.
It has been a while since I flew out of concourse C. I was sort of looking forward to a bagel at Einstein Bagels, but they’re no longer there. Plan B was a breakfast burrito. Next, we headed to the gate. It was here that I discovered that the Southwest app wouldn’t bring up Michael’s boarding pass. When I went to get his boarding pass printed, I could no longer display either my or Genae’s boarding pass. Paper passes for all, then. I’m less than impressed with the Southwest app.
The flight was uneventful (as all good flights are). We didn’t notice until after beverage service was over that, it being Valentine’s Day, they were giving passengers free beer. An opportunity missed.
At the Belize City airport, they don’t have jetways – it’s old school. They drive the Arrested Development stair cars to the plane and we walk down to the tarmac. They did this at both the front and back of the plane, so deboarding was fairly quick. That was the last quick thing for the day.
A United Airlines flight from Denver landed just ahead of us. By the time we got in line for passport control, we were at the end of a line about a hundred yards long and about four people wide. After passport control, we go to customs. The guard let a bunch of people go without being queried about customs declarations, but no shortcut for us. We were asked where we were staying (“a private residence”) and who we were staying with. I gave them Greg’s name, but not an address or even the city he lives in. Just his name was good enough.
We were allowed to pass without being searched.
On to the car rental agency. I was third in line. It took about 45 minutes to complete the transaction. Basically, they were out of cars. One guy was told that his SUV had just been returned, but was having overheating problems. The next guy’s car needed to be washed – “It’ll only take 10 minutes. 10 Belizean minutes!” Our car wasn’t available either. Could we take a smaller car? Needing a car, I assented. “We’ll lower the price since it’s a smaller car.” The price given to me was $25 more than my original quote. That took another few minutes to fix.
We piled into our VW Nivus and headed out. To get out of the rental car parking lot, we had to pay $2 American (or $4 Belizean). I’ve never had to pay to get out of a rental car parking lot before.
Much of our 2.5-hour drive to Corozal would be in the dark on one of Belize’s best roads. (There’s a town called Corozal, in the district called Corozal. We’re headed to Corozal town.) This road is a two-lane highway, signed and striped just like roads here in the USA. The speed limit outside of the towns is 55 mph. But there are speed bumps on this highway. I’ve never seen speed bumps on a highway before. Most of them have warning signs. Most. I hit one of them moving at triple-digit speed. (The VW’s dashboard is set to metric.) Yes, we were going over 100 kph when I spotted the bump. I braked hard, but hit the speed bump harder. We did not catch air, but I was concerned I might have damaged the car. Good thing I got the insurance.
By now, it was getting dark. I got a dashboard warning telling me to turn on the headlights. Seems to me the car should be able to turn the headlights on automatically. It’s not new technology – I had it in a car manufactured last century. I couldn’t find the light switch while going 100 kph and keeping a watch out for speed bumps. Michael even did a quick (and fruitless) web search. I had to pull off the road to figure it out.
Back on the road, we began seeing trucks loaded with sugar cane heading the other way. The trucks were piled high with cane – far too tall to go under any US overpass or traffic signals. They all looked fairly precarious. Canes littered the road at each speed bump. The speed bumps, by the way, are called “sleeping policemen” by the locals.
The air was sometimes thick with smoke. When the cane is harvested, the fields are set afire. At one point, the horizon in front of us was orange with flame. A few minutes later, we saw the field that was burning – it came right up to the road.
Entering Corozal, we still had a bit of a journey ahead of us to get to Consejo Shores. It’s only about 7 miles, but it’s 7 miles of bad dirt road. It’s fairly heavily travelled, but punctuated by potholes small, medium, and large. I managed to miss most of the biggest holes while maintaining a more-or-less 35 kph pace: faster than perhaps I should have been driving, but too slow not to get passed.
We arrived at Greg’s a bit before 8 pm, which was earlier than Greg expected. I had a Belikin beer. This is perhaps the most popular beer in Belize, advertised at just about every cantina and restaurant between Belize City and Corozal. Compared to Colorado craft beers, it’s not great, but it was welcome after this drive. (The name “Belikin” is an amalgamation of several Mayan words meaning either “road to the east” or “road to the burning sun”.)
February 15
A lazy day today. For breakfast, Greg offered up some fresh fruit – guava, melon, pineapple, avocado – and banana bread.
In the early afternoon, it was off to the “beach” for volleyball. I didn’t play, but got into the water to float or sit on the bottom. There’s no beach here, and they play ball in the shallow water. The net is fifty feet or so from the shore, but today (even though some regulars said it was “deep” today), the water was about waist-deep. I ventured a bit farther from the shore, but never found deep water.
For dinner, Greg cooked up some sea bass and Spanish rice. We played games and chatted until after Greg’s bedtime.
The continuing chronicles of Sleepless Dave: Last night, sleep was better until the nightmare started. It started innocently enough when two houseguests began to argue. Then another guest, leaving the “party,” got in his truck and pulled his trailer into my garage, and instead of stopping with the crash, kept trying to power through. This escalated into a fist fight before one of his friends came at me with a blowtorch, and it kept getting worse from there. The usual dream logic applies: it wasn’t my house, but it was my house, and the friends of friends were complete unknown to me. Yeesh.
I could hear cars on the track starting at 8. It’s the DTM cars running on the GP circuit.
I chatted with a couple of Dutch motorcyclists outside the hotel while waiting for Ryan and Laura. I asked if they were there to do laps. They told me bikes are no longer allowed and were sad they didn’t do it before the ban. They also said it was nearly as much fun riding the back roads here in the Eiffel mountains. True, from what I saw on the way here yesterday and on the way back to Brussels today, there is an abundance of Lotus roads in the area.
I’m not sure how we got there, but the topic of history came up. I don’t recall their exact words, but the gist of it was that Europe is rich in history, and America isn’t. It’s certainly true that, wherever I went in Brussels, I found “history”: old buildings, museums, war memorials, the Stolpersteine paving stones remembering Holocaust victims, statues of Kings, and on and on. But it’s also true there’s “history” in America. What we don’t have is millennia of European history. Spaniards built a church in the San Luis Valley at the end of the 16th Century. The cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde had been abandoned for a couple of centuries before the foundation was laid for the ruins of the castle above us. And, frankly, the vast majority of European history is about war and subjugation. We don’t have any Stolpersteine paving stones in Denver. But I digress.
Spa is pretty much halfway between the ‘Ring and Brussels; we used many of the same roads today as on the way here – back roads until near Spa, then expressway the rest of the way to Brussels.
Culture shock: the rest stops on the expressway have pay toilets.
Back in Brussels, Ryan wanted to try a lambic beer. He had a recommendation from one of his clients, but that brewery was closed. We tried another, same result. We ended up near the central square. We tried a white lambic – a bit fruity, a bit sour. I liked it more than Ryan did. But then, he’s not much of a beer drinker.
After they dropped me off at my hotel, I wandered in search of food for dinner and chocolates to take home. Success on both fronts.
I’m ready to go home.
August 8
I left my hotel at 8, thinking I had plenty of time to get to the airport. I walked to the bakery where I bought the delicious raspberry a few days ago, but they didn’t have any today. I “settled” for a couple of chocolate pastries. Then I walked to the bus to the airport.
The airport looked pretty busy. At the bag check, I asked a security guy if this was normal traffic. He said it was, but that some of the computers were down. Life in the modern world, eh? The line through security was pretty long, but I wasn’t worried because I had plenty of time.
On the other side of security, I found myself facing another long line. This was for passport control. They had a line monitor at the end of it, directing folks to the proper line. I didn’t notice there was more than one: the long one was for EU residents. All others were directed to a shorter line. Well, it looked to be shorter, but that was an illusion. I got to chatting with an American in line in front of me who was on the same flight as me. A frequent international traveller, he expressed concern or surprise that the passport people weren’t scanning documents – it was just a visual inspection.
After quite a while in this line, somebody came and made an announcement, whereupon a bunch of people left our line and went to a different line. Something about UK and US passports. After another announcement, closer to us this time, we found we were being directed to a different line. Just as we were getting to the front!
I guess this is where the computer issue was. In our new line, when we got to the front, we scanned our passports, which opened a gate. Next, we stood in front of a camera for a photo, and another gate opened. Successfully navigating this, we got our passports stamped. Finally, I headed to the gate, where I only had to wait a few minutes before boarding started. So much for having plenty of time. I could at last eat my tasty pastry.
The flight from BRU to IAD took off at 11 am. They did a meal service (I had a choice this time, not being in the last row this time), then turned off the cabin lights and had everybody shut their window shades. Nap time, everybody! It being not long after noon, I wasn’t sleepy. I tried reading, but my reading light was like a beacon in the dark, and I didn’t want to annoy my neighbors, so I played a couple of the computer games in the headrest of the seat in front of me.
Customs in the USA was a much different experience than in Europe. First was a passport check. All I was asked was whether I’d bought any expensive gifts. I misspoke: I said “Nothing more than 30€,” but I wasn’t thinking of the 45€ of chocolate I bought yesterday. Next, we claimed our checked bags by picking them up off one conveyor and putting them on another one a few yards down the hall. Presumably, if I’d been chosen for a search, they’d have flagged my bag. I saw no searches going on, so if there were any, they were in a separate room.
In this area, there are monitors on the walls. On these monitors, a succession of messages was displayed. They were all in English, and they all had what I took as a threatening tone. Each one said, “Do this and face prosecution!” or “Don’t do this and face prosecution!” Everything in the messages was common sense – yeah, you might go to jail if you assault a customs official. You might go to jail for assaulting anyone, though, right? It all seems very … unwelcoming.
The flight from IAD to DEN was run-of-the-mill. Again, I watched the flight map. It helpfully displays points of interest – cities, towns, mountains. Of all the mountains they have to choose from in Colorado – Pikes Peak, Longs Peak, the Maroon Bells – they chose Porcupine Hill. I’d never heard of it. It’s barely over 10,000′ high. Bizarre.
Not long after getting home, I sat at my desk to make some notes. It felt like I was still on the plane – my body had the sensation of the motion of the airplane cabin. I guess twelve and a half hours sitting in a metal tube will mess with your senses a bit.
The Nürburgring is only 100km from Spa. It would be senseless to come all this way to drive at Spa and not also visit the world’s most notorious track. Wandering around Brussels was the appetizer; lapping at Spa was the main course; now for the dessert.
August 6
The other day, when I was on the phone with the woman at my hotel, she said my breakfast would be delivered to my room the first morning but that I’d be served in the restaurant today. I assumed this meant I was no longer the hotel’s only guest. Poor assumption!
I walked into the restaurant at 8 and was greeted by a friendly dog. I didn’t see anyone and called out, “Bon jour! Good morning!” Nobody was there. But there was a table laid out for one, with all the items that were brought to my room yesterday. So I sat down and tucked in. A few minutes later, the gentleman who brought me my morning feast yesterday arrived. I have to say, it’s fairly odd being the only guest at the hotel and restaurant. I don’t expect it’ll ever happen to me again.
The drive from Spa to Nürburg was a pleasant excursion through rural Belgium and Germany. We were on back roads all the way. Even if the navigation system didn’t tell us we were only a few kilometers away from the town, we knew we were getting closer when we started seeing all the sports cars.
I couldn’t check into my hotel until after 5, and we couldn’t check in at Rent-4-Ring until 4, so we had some time to kill. We grabbed lunch (bratwurst and beer, with my beer being cheaper than Ryan’s Coke), then took a wander through the ruins of the 12th-century castle. They say you get a nice view of things from the top of the tower, but as my luck would have it, it’s encased in scaffolding, closed for renovation. They’re not going to renovate a castle that was destroyed about 350 years ago, but I guess they need to make sure it’s good enough that tourists don’t die when they climb to the top of it.
Nürburg is a unique place. My home race track, High Plains Raceway, is in the middle of nowhere. It brings quite a bit of business to the gas station and motel in Byers. Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps is surrounded by little towns. The track drives most of the visits to the hotels and restaurants in these towns. Aside from being close to a world-famous race track, though, they’re just normal little towns.
Nürburg takes it to a whole different level. The track is an industry in and of itself. Without the track, this place wouldn’t exist. BMW has its M test center here. There’s a mall here filled with stores I’ve never seen in any other mall. Want a driver’s suit or gloves? Stop at the race gear store. Looking for a new car? You have choices: there’s a store full of BMW M vehicles and a Caterham dealer. Scale models and memorabilia abound. The most normal thing at this mall was the Subway sandwich shop.
I was thinking we’d get to take our laps pretty much right after we registered, but that wasn’t the case. The track was having some sort of race driver training/education day. Touristenfahrten (“tourist drives”) didn’t start until 6, so we just sat for a while on the bench outside the rental office. It was a beautiful day, so why not? There really wasn’t much else to do.
There are dozens of places in Nürburg where you can rent a car and coach, hotels galore, even a casino and a roller coaster. To top it all off, there’s a Grand Prix race track here, too. The Nordschliefe, the track we’ll be driving on, hosted F1 races back in the 60s, but it’s far too dangerous for modern F1 cars. Today, they’re getting the place set up for a DTM race on the GP track.
At 5:30, we had our briefing. Today, the Nordschliefe is not a race track. It’s a one-way public toll road with no speed limit. Keep right except to pass. Pass only on the left; if you pass on the right, you’ll get ejected. Anybody can drive it – track rats in their Porsches, novices in VWs, and grandmothers in station wagons. You can drive just about any vehicle except a bus or a motorcycle. And, because it’s been closed all day, there’s a big line revved up and waiting to go.
At the ‘Ring, at least on Touristenfahrten days, you aren’t required to wear a helmet, which always struck me as odd. There’s no way I’d lap this place without a helmet. Also, the car I’m renting has a roll cage. I’d never drive a caged car without a brain bucket. Rent4Ring’s rule is that if you have an instructor, they’ll wear a helmet and therefore require you to also.
My coach, Nashe, had a pretty good American accent. I asked him how. A great way to develop an American accent is to grow up in Missouri, which is what Nashe did. He has been living here for five years. He used to race motorcycles. He’s the “new guy” at Rent4Ring with “only” about a thousand laps of the Nordschliefe under his belt. That’s about 13,000 miles.
The prospect of trying to drive fast around this track intimidates me. I’m all sorts of apprehensive about it. There are YouTube channels devoted to showing crashes here. Rent4Ring has a sign in their briefing room: “Don’t feed the YouTubers – Drive safely!” People die here every year. Let’s just say I have a healthy respect for the place. I’m not going to drive beyond my limits, but shit happens.
Nashe did a fantastic job of talking me around the track. I struggled with instruction at Spa, and I was worried about how it would go today. But it’s two very different sorts of instruction. Kostas was trying to teach me the proper racing line, which I would get to practice lap after lap. Nashe was telling me exactly what to do. “Stay right, there’s a Porsche coming up on you. Brake, brake, brake, let off, let the car go wide, give it some throttle, turn in now and keep it tight, give it some throttle and go as fast as you’re comfortable,” pretty much non-stop for the entire lap.
It took me about three turns to get comfortable with this sort of instruction. My pre-lap jitters were unfounded.
When we registered, I said more than once that I’d only do one lap. We reached the Karussel (about 8 miles in) before I knew it. It went by so quickly. Between there and the end of the lap, it was clear I had to go around again.
The second lap was a bit more hectic – more traffic. I didn’t check the time when I got on the track for the first lap, but they were running three lanes of cars past the card readers, so there was a steady stream of cars getting on the track, and not very many of them quit after one lap, so traffic was getting worse every minute. I haven’t checked the video, but I’m guessing I encountered at least thirty more cars on the second lap than I did on the first.
I always thought driving a car on a track required your full concentration. At the ‘Ring, it’s like that, but on steroids. Staying right when cars come up from behind, working out how to get around slower traffic, and driving fast, all with almost no margin for error, because if you go off the track, you’ll be in the barrier.
Two laps was plenty. If there’d been half as much traffic, I might have been tempted to go around again, but I knew it would only get worse. I don’t care how much you like driving on a track – traffic never makes things better. My first lap probably had as little traffic as you’re likely to get here, so I feel quite fortunate.
In Germany, beer is cheaper than Coke
Renovating the Ruin (not Renovating the Castle)
My car today
Skeleton key!
In the end, I had much more fun than I expected. I put it all down to the coaching. No amount of practice on a simulator or watching YouTube videos could prepare me to be both as fast and as safe as I was with Nashe. It was a lot of money – each lap cost more than a full day at HPR – but it’s truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me.
It was a full day – I didn’t get back to my hotel room until 9 pm.
My hotel is maybe thirty yards from the entrance to the castle ruins. I didn’t try to estimate the age of the hotel. Like at so many other buildings I’ve been in on this trip, I thought, jokingly, “This place isn’t up to code.” Small, steep stairs, the door at an angle to the little entry. And I mean little. It’s only an inch or so wider than my suitcase. The pièce de résistance was the skeleton key. Skeleton key, how quaint. The last time I used a skeleton key was in February of 1975, in the Soviet Union.
And now we finally arrive at the reason for this whole trip to Belgium.
I first saw Formula 1 at Spa on The Wide World of Sports in the late 1960s; you’d get about a fifteen-minute highlight clip from the broadcast with Jackie Stewart doing commentary. But it wasn’t until I started watching F1 in 1994 that Spa really grabbed my attention. For about thirty years, if you’d have asked me what my favorite track is, the answer was Spa.
I don’t golf, but I imagine my driving a car at Spa is akin to a golfer getting to play a round at St. Andrews. For me, a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Wow. I’m here.
August 5
I’m sorry to sound like a broken record, but I had yet another bad night’s sleep. Two and a half hours of sleep, about that much tossing and turning, then a couple more hours of sleep. It was raining the entire time I was awake.
My breakfast was delivered promptly at seven. It put the fare at my Brussels hotel to shame: a basket of bread (three different rolls and two pastries), orange juice, grapes, cold cuts, cheese, a few cherry tomatoes, peach yogurt, fixings for coffee, and an assortment of packets: Nutella, honey, two different jams, and butter. Far too much for me to eat!
Ryan picked me up at 7:20, and we were at the track a few minutes later.
First on the agenda was the drivers’ briefing. I’ve driven quite a few tracks now, and although there are many similarities, each track runs things their own way. As Dorothy said, “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore!” Here at Spa, things are quite different than any of the tracks in the USA. I’m pretty sure it’s a European thing and not just this track.
At home, we’re required to have our windows down. If you get in an accident, the glass from the side windows won’t go everywhere. And the rescue crew won’t have to break a window to get you out of the car. Here, windows have to be up. Even for convertibles!
At home, when faster cars catch up to you, you give them a “point-by”: use an arm signal to tell them which side to pass. At Spa, with windows up, you can’t do that. Here, you use your turn signal to indicate which side you’ll go to, and the overtaking car goes on the other side. That took me several laps to get accustomed to.
I will point out a few more notable differences later.
After the briefing, we met our instructors. Mine was Konstantinos Zannos (Kostas), a native of Greece now living in Spa. In over 70 track days, I’ve never had an instructor before. A couple of times, at Portland and COTA, I’ve given rides to instructors, but it wasn’t for coaching – they just wanted rides in a Lotus.
Kostas set up some helmet-to-helmet communications so we could talk to each other. In my car, top off, window down, and engine behind your head, without an intercom, it would be impossible to communicate other than by hand signals. In my Spa rental car, a BMW M240i x-Drive, a comfy coupe, we’d have had little problem. Still, a comms setup like this is the way to go.
During the briefing, it was mentioned that the most common accident on track is a driver going off in the first turn. This made me think of my day at Harris Hill, where I did exactly that. Naturally, today I again did exactly that. The Kemmel straight is the fastest part of the track. The track was still wet from the overnight rain. But most importantly, the turn is much tighter than I expected. I was tentative, too light and late on the braking. I missed it big time! It won’t be in the highlight reel, though, as I wasn’t running the camera in the first session.
I really struggled that first session, despite Kostas’ excellent instruction. It’s a new track in damp conditions (still wet from the overnight rain) in a car I’d never driven before, which is about twice the weight of my car and also a fair bit faster. On top of that, it’s a long lap – the longest I’ve driven. It felt like every time around, I’d forget half of what he told me the previous lap. I probably frustrated him a bit, but he was very patient with me. I had his services for an hour, where I drove a six-lap session. That was my second-longest session of the day. Later in the day, we had a good laugh about my off.
His instructions did help. On my next lap, my first without him, I was 9 seconds faster, and on the lap after that, an additional 7 seconds. I ran into him several times throughout the day. When I came back from those two laps, he asked how I did. I told him I did a 3:12. He asked if I thought I could do a 3:00. I wonder why he picked that time. Because it’s an even three minutes? Or what he thought a good (average? novice?) driver should do a three-minute lap in that car? I managed a 3:02. I don’t know if that’s fast or slow, but I’m happy with it. I showed consistent improvement throughout the day and was getting comfortable with the track.
He was very perceptive. I was very tentative those first laps. Rather than saying I was tentative, he described exactly how I was applying the brakes. I couldn’t have described what I did any better myself. I had a couple of moments where the car got a bit squirrely, and he diagnosed them immediately. Once, he told me not to watch the car ahead too closely, because I’ll follow them instead of going where I need to go. He was right. I realized I was doing that just a moment before Kostas pointed it out. He was very attuned to what the car was doing, what I was doing.
Almost every track day I’ve done, drivers are broken into groups, either by experience (novice, intermediate, experienced) or speed (fast, slow). Today, we had no groups. We could just go out any time we wanted. That was nice, but Ryan and I both agree that a fast/slow grouping would have made us happier. There were some very fast cars out there and some classic small sports cars, so the closing speeds were sometimes … frightening isn’t the right word – maybe unexpected is better.
One of the other big differences in operating is the way red flags work. At home, if a red flag is thrown, everybody is supposed to come to a prompt stop. Here, everyone is to proceed to the pits until whatever incident occurred is cleared up. Once cleared, the track goes green and cars can return to the track. Pretty much like F1. I suspect, with no supporting evidence, that our flaggers today also worked the F1 race.
Unfortunately, we had a lot of red flags. I lost count. I generally expect to get four sessions, 20 to 30 minutes each. I had more sessions today, but that wasn’t a good thing. There were several times I got only a couple of laps before the red flag appeared. Twice, it happened on my out lap. My lap timer recorded nine sessions: 6 laps, 3, 0, 3, 4, 9, 0, 3, and 5 laps.
My car rental was for 300km, and I had to buy my own gas. When I first registered, I thought 300km wasn’t enough. So when I got an email offering an additional two-hour session, I signed up. I wasn’t thinking, though, that it was just extra time, not extra kilometers. It might have come in handy had the weather been bad, though.
As the regular session neared completion, I knew I’d do my 300km without needing the evening session. RSR were kind enough to refund my money. They normally don’t do refunds, instead giving vouchers good for three years.
The gas pumps didn’t offer me receipts, so I don’t know how much fuel I used. Heck, until I get the credit card bill, I won’t know how much I spent. The cost works out to a bit more than $7.50 a gallon. I think I spent nearly $200 on gas. My car would have been half that, or less.
I had a short moment of panic when the fuel pump didn’t accept my Visa card. The whole trip, I’ve been trying to use my AmEx card, but many places didn’t take it. I had not been anywhere that took AmEx but not Visa, so when the pump declined my Visa, I thought I was in trouble. But the AmEX worked. A few minutes later, Ryan called me with the same complaint – his Visa wasn’t working. I offered to let him use my AmEx, but Laura had her AmEx card. I mentioned this to another driver a few minutes later, and he told me it had to do with a PIN number. If the card didn’t require a PIN, it declined the card. But… but… my AmEx card doesn’t have a PIN.
It took me a while to get used to the car. The fastest I’ve gotten my car is 121 or 122 mph. I’ve driven a Ferrari 458 and a McLaren 650S at HPR and got neither of those cars over 125 (not that they’re not easily capable of it). Today, I managed consistently to get the BMW to 138 on the Kemmel straight.
Ryan’s car was race-prepared. That is, it has a roll-cage, racing seats, and the fancy dashboard was replaced with basic gauges. It’s equipped with a 4-point harness. This is another difference between here and home. In the US, 4-point harnesses are not allowed. A 5- or 6-point harness is required if a harness is used. The 4-point does not prevent “submarining” – in an accident, the driver is not prevented from coming out of the seat below the steering wheel. You really want a harness that keeps you securely in the seat.
The seats in my rental car have substantial side bolsters. They keep you from moving very far laterally. By the end of the day, I was feeling it in my kidneys. I’m not saying I felt like I was getting kidney-punched, but I was getting pretty sore. In the Lotus, the seats have very little padding, and after a long day, I can get a little tender along my spine, but I find the seat is otherwise comfortable. And I like my CG lock. The day after Spa, I did feel a bit like I got a little worked over.
I brought the vent mounts I use in the Lotus for mounting the phone, but the vents in the BMW would not accommodate them. I like being able to see my lap timer. I think it’s an important tool. If I couldn’t mount the phone, I’d have to keep it in my pocket. I’ve done that before, and the data quality suffers. Badly. When he got in the car, Kostas put his phone in the cup holder. He said he does it all the time, no problem. I can’t see the timer, but at least I’m collecting the data. (Yet another difference – at home, we are to remove all loose articles from the car – nothing should be able to fly about the cabin in the case of an accident. I’d never leave anything like a phone unsecured.)
My breakfast
Today’s rental car – BMW M240i x-Drive
Me and my instructor
I got passed by these guys
F1 pit box markings
As is my habit, I try to talk to my Lotus people. Today, there was only one Lotus. I did manage to introduce myself, but it was a brief conversation. He’s Swiss, has run at Spa many times. He volunteered that it’s a six-hour drive for him. A man after my own heart – he doesn’t trailer his car, either.
All day, the car complained about low tire pressure. A warning showed up on the display – it took up most of the screen. I had to clear it every time I started the car. And I had to remember to do this before I put my gloves on. The low tire pressure is expected – at the track, we run pressures lower than appropriate on the road. The mechanics said they couldn’t configure the car to turn the warning off.
Fairly often, the dashboard would beep and flash red and tell me I needed to brake. It’s sensing cars that are a fair distance ahead of me that are in their braking zones while I’m still accelerating. (Listen for it, if you watch the video.) One time, I got a message that I had a serious drivetrain problem and should get service. I was low on gas, but I’d been lower earlier.
I completed my 300km just a few minutes before the end of the day’s session. RSR were serving champagne, beer, and snacks. Ryan and I had a beer with Kostas and a couple of guys he was chatting with. I mentioned that I’d like to go to England and visit the factory in Hethel. One of the other guys responded in a deep Scottish brogue, “Oh, a Lotus man!” He now owns his 4th Lotus, a V6 Exige not available in the US except as a track-only car.
The other guy in the conversation, Dave, a Brit, was looking for a particular one of the snacks being served. There were none at our table. He flagged down a server, who came by a few minutes later with another little basket of them. Kostas and the Scot gave him grief about liking them. They’re a Dutch treat called bitterballen. They said I should try one, so I did. They’re little deep-fried meat concoctions. After I bit into one, they told me they’re generally called “dog’s balls.” Ryan and I instantly asked if they’d tried Rocky Mountain Oysters.
All done at the track, Ryan, Laura, and I went in search of dinner. The first place we tried was closed. The second was open and looked to have many empty tables, but we were turned away because we didn’t have reservations. We ended up at a fast-food joint called Canadian Burger and Pizza. Outside stood an old Bob’s Big Boy statue. I had a BBQ burger. It was much like the BBQ burger I had in Brussels – not at all BBQ.
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.
