we ever! Last time we had arrived in Springfield, Illinois on our way to Indianapolis for the big race. While in Springfield we did some sightseeing around the Illinois capitol. We spent several hours touring the Dana-Thomas house. This is a very large, beautiful home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in the early 1900's. We also toured the old Illinois capitol building and walked around downtown checking out all the "Lincoln slept/lived/worked here" stuff. Lincoln is very big in Springfield!On our last day in Springfield we did some geocaching around the general area. Many of the caches were in various parks along the shore of Lake Springfield, a very nice lake at the south edge of town. We managed to find eight caches. A couple of the finds took us to old abandoned sections of original Route 66, which was a concrete divided roadway through this area before the freeway came. We also made a couple more visits to the Elks Lodge and found them to be a fairly friendly group.
On Wednesday, May 21st we left Springfield and traveled East to Crawfordsville, Indiana, about 35 miles Northwest of Indianapolis. We wanted to be able to arrive fairly early at the racetrack on Thursday for our rally, so we planned a one night stay at Crawfordsville. On Thursday morning we arrived at the track about noon and were able to get settled in. The rally parking was on a nice level gravel parking lot right across the street from the south end of the race track. We were only three coaches in from the street, very convenient for viewing the craziness of race weekend. (More about that later)
After we settled in we walked over to the track and spent a couple hours walking around the infield area where there were a bunch of sponsor booths and souvenir stands set up. One of the party tents was sponsored by Jim Beam and when you went in, you got a wrist band with two
detachable tabs, each one good for one free drink! Since Jackie doesn't drink bourbon, I managed to get five nice cocktails! (one return trip the guy didn't take my tab) Yea for walking distance parking! Also got to drive the race car simulator - like a video game on steroids. The cockpit was on hydraulic legs for motion simulation and you were all belted in and hunkered down just like in the Indy cars. There was a big TV screen in front of you and away you went on a simulated banked oval. If you got down too low on the track, or up against the wall, the simulator would shake the beejeebees out of you. Quite a lot of fun. Didn't even have to pay for the fun because it was sponsored by AAA and you got to ride it if you were a member.The next morning was Friday, which is "Carb Day" at the track. This is the day when the Indy cars get their last practice session before the race on Sunday. It was named carb day from the days when cars actually HAD carburetors and they would do the final fuel calibrations. Of
course, everything is electronic controlled fuel injection now, but we found out over the course of our stay here that tradition is very big at Indy. There was also supposed to be a 100 mile Indy Lights race in the afternoon. The Indy Lights are to the Indy cars as the NASCAR Busch cars are to the the Cup cars. They "only" go about 185 mph rather than the 225 that the big boys drive. Jackie woke up Friday morning with another bout of vertigo and decided to skip the activities at the track. I packed up and headed over about 10 to watch the practice session. They got in about two laps and the rain started. It then rained on and off the rest of the day, cancelling both the final practice session and the Indy Lights race. I finally gave up about 2:00 and headed back to the coach. We spent the rest of the day doing some light shopping and checking out the area. Our rally also included a dinner Friday night, however, it was set up as an outside event with no tent or shelter. Although it was raining, most everyone from the rally came over to the catering area and loaded up from the buffet line. It was a basic fried chicken, beans and coleslaw kind of meal, so we were able to just take it back to the coach and eat. No camaraderie with your fellow campers, but hey - free food.Saturday there are normally no activities at the track, however, because of the rain on Friday they rescheduled the Indy Lights race for noon. The weather was nice again and Jackie was feeling better, so we headed over to the track to watch the race. There were no assigned seats for this event so we watched from the bleachers right behind the pits on the front straight. The race was pretty good, although from our seats we weren't high enough up to really see anything except about 100 feet of the track. Also, since it was only a 40 lap race, there was no pit activity to watch. After the race we went back to the campground and noticed a significant increase in activity along 16th street, the road that runs along the south edge of the speedway. As the afternoon wore on, the number of motorcycles and cool cars continued to increase until it was a continual parade. Come to find out, Saturday night before the race is the "happening" night. 16th street becomes a cruising site from the corner of 16th and Georgetown, which is the main entrance to the track, to a place called Mike's Speedway Lounge, about a mile east. We had actually been told about Mike's by someone we met at an Elk's Lodge in Colorado. He told us that Mike's was a "have to visit" place.
About 6:00 we drove down to Mike's and found a relatively dive bar with about three hundred motorcycles in the parking lot. We went in, had a couple drinks and ate dinner there. They only
had sandwiches, but they were pretty good. Afterwards we took a couple drinks outside and sat on the grass at the side of road next to the parking lot and just watched the bikes and cars cruising in and out of Mike's and the bar across the street. The music was playing and people were having fun. Apparently, the police suspend the drinking in public laws unless you are creating a disturbance or driving because everyone in the parking lot and walking on the street had a drink in their hand. About 8:00 we went back to the campground and found everyone from the rally sitting in their lawn chairs along the side of 16th street. As the night came there were literally hundreds of motorcycles going up and down the street, thousands of people walking around and everyone having a great time. About 11:00 the people from the rally started to head back to their coaches, so Jackie and I took a walk down towards Georgetown 
Road. This road runs north and south along the west side of the speedway. We found that they closed the road to traffic and let folks set up booze and souvenir booths along the street. There were about 25,000 people walking around the streets partying and it was almost midnight. There were cops all over the place, but while we were walking around we didn't see anything except people having a good time. I chatted with one Indy cop and he told me that about 2:00 in the morning they would get a few fights breaking out and that the party would go on until probably 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. We went to bed about 1:00 and fell asleep by the sound of motorcycles cruising the street. This has to have been one of the more interesting and entertaining "events" we have been a part of since we started travelling.Sunday morning, Race Day. The race was scheduled to start around 1:00, but we went over about 10:00. We wanted to experience the whole happening so we had lunch at one of the
vendors and then went up to our seats. We actually had great seats about two thirds of the way up the grandstand which was right in the middle of the "short chute" between turns one and two. We were up high enough to see both turns, the short straight between them and a little bit of both front and back straightaways. There are no seats at Indy that let you see the whole track, so ours were pretty good. We watched all the pre-race stuff, the parade of drivers, a salute to veterans with about a hundred uniformed folks from all services parading around the track in pickup trucks. Good old Gomer Pyle (Jim Nabors) sang Back Home in Indiana like he does every year. Florence Henderson did God Bless America (she apparently does it every year too) and Jackie and I both decided she probably ought to retire. The little cutie from Dancing with the Stars, Juliane Hough did a great job with the National Anthem. The
flyover was a group from the Navy Top Gun school and was two Navy F-18 Hornets and two F-16's decorated as "aggressors" with a big red star on the side. Gee, I wonder who they're supposed to represent?The race went for almost five hours, which is a long time to be on a hard metal bench with no backrest, but we brought booze. It was a great race and until you actually attend a race you don't appreciate the colors and noise the cars make and how fast they are actually going. TV is a comfortable way to watch a race, but being there makes a big difference in how you appreciate the sport. I had found the same thing in my previous attendance at NASCAR races. There were a couple of wrecks on our end of the
track, and the paper the next day said there were more accidents at this race then in the last 10 years. No big wrecks though, and no one hurt. One of the nice things about our seats was that not only did we have a good view of a pretty large section of track, we had one of the big "Jumbo-tron" TV screens in the infield right in front of us. That way we were able to easily keep up with what was going on around the rest of the track. The best thing about the seats was that after the race we got up and eight minutes later we were sitting in a lawn chair with a drink watching the other 350,000 fans try to get out of the track and out of the area. Interestingly, within three hours there was no one on the street. When I lived in Phoenix, it would take four hours just to get out of the track parking lots after the NASCAR race.On Monday morning, Memorial Day, we headed out of the rally site for a campground on the other side of Indianapolis, actually about 30 miles East of town. We went there to visit with some good friends of ours, Randy and Charlene Basom. These are folks that we met on the road the
first year we were traveling. They are also fulltimers and have the same year and make of coach we have, with the same exterior paint scheme. We have met up with them several times over the last couple years as we wandered the country. Their daughter Amy, and her husband John, live in a small town East of Indianapolis. Amy has just had her first baby, a little girl named Abby. We had been with the whole family last 4th of July in Washington and this was when Amy had found out she was pregnant, so Jackie thinks of herself as an adopted aunt. We wanted to spend a few days with the five of them. The first night, Monday, we met them at a local restaurant for dinner in celebration of Amy's birthday. The second day we went over to John and Amy's place for the afternoon and for a BBQ dinner there. Randy and 
Charlene have their motorhome parked in the yard next to the barn. They have been staying there for about four months helping while Amy was pregnant. The third day we were there we again spent the afternoon with the group, but this time we took them out geocaching. Randy and Charlene had never heard of it before we talked to them about it and they thought they might enjoy it. We went out and found six caches in a couple hours that afternoon and Randy and Charlene were hooked.On Thursday morning we bid farewell to the Indianapolis area and started north towards Elkhart, Indiana. Elkhart and the surrounding area are an RV manufacturing center. Monaco Coach has a couple of factories there and also has a factory service center. Our coach was due for its annual service (oil, lube, filters, etc.) and we thought since we were going to be in the area anyway we would go to Monaco for the service. The service center has a free campground for customers so we checked in and got set up. The down side to using the factory service center is that they start work at 6:30 a.m. We don't normally do anything before nine or ten in the morning, so having to get up at five to have the coach ready to roll into the garage at 6:30 was tough on us. Friday morning came and we managed though and by 8:00 we were eating breakfast! Another unusual event for us. They finished off the coach late in the afternoon so we parked back in the campground, planning to leave for the Chicago area first thing Saturday morning. Saturday morning we packed up the coach and got on the freeway heading towards Chicago. Right after we started I noticed that the transmission temperature gauge was very erratic and was jumping all over the dial. One of the things I had serviced on Friday was the transmission. Since the problem hadn't existed before Friday, I guessed that the tech had either broken a wire or left one loose. Since I didn't want to travel with a malfunctioning gauge, we turned around and went right back to Camp Monaco and set up again. We relaxed on Saturday and on Sunday decided to go and do some geocaching in the area since we were stuck there anyway. We managed to find nine caches, all right in the downtown Elkhart area. We found several very nice parks we would never have seen were it not for our geocaching hobby.
On Monday morning I got the service writer at 7:00 and told them about the problem. They took the coach right into the garage and by 9:00 it was fixed and we were ready to roll. It had
been a loose connection on the sending unit, probably bumped during the servicing of the coach. Since we were only going to be able to spend two days in the Chicago area because of the delay in getting out of Elkhart, we elected to stay at a campground in Gary, Indiana, about 25 miles from Chicago. The next morning, Tuesday the 3rd of June, we headed into Chicago for some sightseeing. Unfortunately, it poured down rain the whole day so we weren't able to do any real walking around. We drove around the city and looked at the sights as best we could, but we really couldn't do it justice. I guess we will just have to come back to Chicago someday. We will be leaving for Milwaukee, the city of my birth, on Wednesday morning. Our stay there will be the topic of my next blog chapter.Until then, keep the shiny side up and the greasy side down!
