Thursday, November 3, 2011

September 17, 2011 Lime Rock Park

  Saturday we got up early to drive north to Lime Rock Park, a famous racetrack in Lakeville, Connecticut. They were having the NASCAR Modified tour along with F2000 and F1600 championships.

     Along the way I was hoping to see some beautiful fall colors, however the trees where just starting to change colors, so I didn’t get to see that. We did pass through a lot of small towns, one which had a really cool waterfall.  Only 15 minutes away from the track we came to a road block, and had to turn around and find a different way to the track.


Leaves just starting to turn yellow.
  By the time we got inside, the race had already started, so we went to find a place to sit on the grassy hillside. It’s really a cool track, it’s built around a hill so you can just sit on the hill to watch as there are no grandstands. After watching for not too long I decided I was going to take a little bit of video, just to show how loud the cars were, and I ended up catching a crash on video. Luckily no one was hurt.
   


We decided to go down into the pits to get a closer look at the cars. They are a very different kind of NASCAR and they run huge tires that stick out the sides. A little ugly in my opinion, but it was fun to watch.
We wanted to go watch a few other corners where we could get closer to the track so we started walking that way. A guy in a golf cart gave us a free ride to the other side of the track. Then just as we were walking down I witnessed a second crash. This one was worse then the first as the car hit the guard rail that was there to keep the cars from smashing the concrete walls of the overpass. Luckily the driver wasn’t hurt and we got to watch as they came and repaired the guard rail and towed the car away. This wasn't their first time, as they very quickly repaired and straightened the guard rail.


The second accident I saw, just after it happened



      Then we watched the F2000 cars race. There was one car that we were calling the McDonalds car because it was yellow and red, and it went off track and almost caused several accidents a few different times, not sure what was up with that.

You can see the red and yellow car that spun off the track on the left




A church outside of the track
We left before the races were over because we had a several hour drive to our hotel. We were going to stay in Scranton, Pennsylvania and we were going to have to find a place to eat along the way. On the way we passed this really cool looking house, so we turned around to take a picture of it, then we realized it wasn’t a house, it was just the gatehouse for a driveway, I think someone had some money.

Entry gate to someones driveway
When Tom Tom told us to exit, it said we still had a mile to go to get to the motel, but as we turned we drove past a Best Western Plus, which is where we were supposed to stay at. We decided to follow our GPS to see where it took us. . . well it took us to nowhere, so we turned around and went back. As we pulled in the driveway Nate said to me “You going to find this funny.” Not understanding what he meant I asked him “What’s funny?” “You’ll see in a minute” he said. Sure enough as we got out of the car to walk up to the door there was a Tom Tom company van at the motel.  Hopefully in the future they will know where that motel is.


As we checked in they were confirming that we had booked a Jacuzzi suite, and we said we booked through priceline.com so I guess that’s what we got. Unfortunately it was a smoking room, and while they didn’t have any non-smoking rooms of any kind available, it wasn’t that bad in there.

1 comment:

  1. Crazy that you happened to catch a car crash on video!

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