Category: Travel Stories

Mostly these are written for friends and family.

Portugal Diary 4

by philg

Renting a car at the Lisbon airport takes so long that I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone getting off a transatlantic flight. Catch an Uber into Lisbon or Sintra, spend a few nights, and then send one designated victim back to the Lisbon airport to wait in various lines for 1.5 hours (the Sixt folks said that our 1.5-hour wait occurred during a “calm” period and that it could and would get much much worse; a normally polite American grandma described her experience at Hertz on a different day as a “sh*tshow”). After the car is obtained, have the rest of the family or group Uber out to the airport (only about 15 minutes from downtown Lisbon) to meet the designated victim. Some folks waiting in the line to get paperwork and then the line for people who successfully obtained paperwork:

Try to avoid being given a plug-in hybrid. These are impossible to charge in Portugal unless you apply for an EDP account, which is impractical unless you have a Portuguese fiscal number (like our Social Security number), a European bank account with IBAN, a Portuguese phone number, and a few days to wait for various hurdles to be cleared. I never saw a charging station that accepted credit cards. Our plug-in hybrid Mercedes had almost no trunk space due to the big battery that we had no way to charge. It was dragged out from an obscure corner of the garage so covered with dust and dirt that it wasn’t safe to drive (the employees cleaned the windows for us before we left). To add insult to injury, the car failed within 48 hours and then Sixt charged us 61 euros for the tow truck that had to come out (we didn’t buy “roadside assistance” for their defective cars). A little more abuse after we got back to the U.S… Sixt charge us 395 euros for a purported scratch to a wheel (or maybe just a plastic wheel cover; we never figured that out), which included fees for “loss of use” (they already said that the car needed to go to a dealer for battery/computer repairs) and “damage handling fee”. I don’t remember ever scraping a curb (Portuguese curbs are, in general, low and rounded) so I think the root cause of this debacle might be that the car was delivered so dirty it wasn’t possible to see a minor pre-existing scratch.

The car-based portion of our trip began at the Mafra palace, which has its own basilica:

Being royal meant doing a lot of shooting:

It was also possible to read:

They also had a pre-flippers pinball machine and what seems like a precursor to foosball:

Here’s lunch at a restaurant a few steps from the palace:

Next stop was the Buddha Eden garden, previously described, and then Nazaré, Europe’s capital for big wave surfing in the winter. Here’s a view from Sitio de Nazaré, which overlooks the beach and has a nice church and square;

Then it was on to Batalha, home to a UNESCO World Heritage church and monastery. A Portuguese travel agent discouraged us from staying here, but it turned out to be a great base for two nights. We were surprised to learn that the monastery contains Portugal’s tomb of the unknown soldier (the country fought as England’s ally in World War I).

On the way to Grutas de Mira de Aire (limestone caves), we stopped to walk on a Roman road. Note the difference between 1x and 3x on the iPhone (at 1x you can see the Roman wind turbine and the Roman picnic tables):

Fortunately, they’re not afraid to punch up the caves with a bit of color:

On the way back to Batalha, we stopped at Castelo de Porto de Mós:

Then it was back to our AirBnB, which was a tiny but efficient 2BR ($105/night including cleaning):

One thing that we learned is that if you want fast reliable Internet, AirBnB is the best lodging option. The large Portuguese WiFi networks never seemed to be fast or reliable. Free WiFi at the Lisbon airport, for example, never worked at all (two visits a week apart). Hotel Internet was always slower than AirBnB WiFi and also subject to interruptions, dead zones, etc.

The next day, after some tow truck assistance to reset our Mercedes plug-in hybrid’s brain, we drove to Coimbra and Portugal dos Pequenitos, a theme park of miniatures covered in Celebrating Juneteenth here in Portugal. After that, we drove up the hill to the founded-in-1290 university to see the famous library (no photos allowed) and, coincidentally, a lot of graduation celebrations:

Coimbra is a nice town, but the hills make it tough to get around, at least from a Floridian’s perspective.

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Portugal Trip Diary 2

by philg

I’m wondering if it wouldn’t have been smart to stay in Belém, a neighborhood of Lisbon that is rich in tourist attractions. I would recommend that everyone visiting Lisbon start at the commercial immersive Earthquake Museum, a 1.5-hour experience that helps you understand how the various parts of the post-1755 city are arranged. Their motto is “expect the unexpected”, which got the 10-year-old tangled up in mental knots (“If you expect something then how can it be unexpected?”).

We hit the nearby Belém palácio restaurant (excellent basic Portuguese food, including the cuttlefish below) and then the obligatory tourist stop at Pastéis de Belém for pastries that are almost exactly the same as pastel de nata (crunchier crust, perhaps):

It was then time to experience peacocks at the tropical botanical garden:

(The 10-year-old’s standard statement on seeing any peacock: “Dad, buy me a shotgun and then… problem solved.” We actually do have a neighbor who received a 28 gauge shotgun at age 9 and, therefore, is equipped to deal with any problems caused by ornamental peafowl.)

I’m going to cover the powerplant part of MAAT, the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, separately, but here are a few photos of the art part:

Visitors could take off their shoes and enter the installation to pound away on about 30 different drums. This proved extremely popular with some members of our group…

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Portugal Trip Diary 1

by philg

Palm Beach International has an in-terminal art museum. Here’s a work regarding homophobia that is so pervasive and severe that the artwork “to discuss homophobia” was selected for display to several million travelers:

Our 8-year-old was seated next to a New Yorker on the flight to EWR:

Incompetence by United Airlines resulted in the inbound plane arriving at PBI one hour late. That put us right into prime Florida afternoon thunderstorm territory so there was an additional delay while lightning struck all around the airport and the ramp was closed. I bit my nails as the 2.5-hour plane change time in Newark, during which we’d have to take a bus from Terminal A to Terminal C, was eaten away.

Despite the time crunch at EWR, I managed to get a photo of an all-gender family restroom, the last so-labeled that we would likely see for three weeks:

The young, slender, apparently healthy, and righteous wore their masks in the EWR terminal and then while walking onto our EWR-LIS flight:

All of my nail-biting was pointless. The flight was showing on time when we rushed to the gate to find… no Boeing 787. Flightaware showed that the plane had landed two days earlier. Where was the plane? “They’re bringing it over from the hangar,” said a United employee. “I don’t know why they didn’t do it earlier.” After everyone was boarded we couldn’t close the door because the in-flight entertainment system wasn’t working properly. We departed more than two hours late and, thus, could have enjoyed a relaxed dinner if the delays hadn’t been piecemeal.

The Lisbon airport is so close to downtown that Uber Black is only about $30. More comfortable than a tuktuk anyway:

We stayed at the Altis Prime apartment hotel in Principe Real. This is walking distance from the tourist Baixa while quieter and more convenient for doing business. The hotel is around the corner from a synagogue so, literally within hours after we arrived, the kids got to see a Free Palestine march:

(Only about 50 out of Greater Lisbon’s 2.9 million residents chose to participate.)

After a bit of napping to recover from our United Basic Economy experience (Economy wouldn’t have been any better; by the time we booked there weren’t any decent clusters of four seats available and the premium seats were all sold out), we headed down to the Baixa (heart of downtown) and found a quiet pro-Ukraine gathering:

The next day we went to the natural history museum that is near our hotel and found this juxtaposition of an electron microscope up against a tile wall, which is an 800-year-old tradition in Portugal:

The museum is next to one of Lisbon’s three (at least) botanical gardens:

From the garden it is a quick walk to the Bairro Alto, a neighborhood just above the Baixa that is served by an elevator and a funicular:

I remembered the Time Out Market as being fun, but that was in September. In June it is mobbed to the point that there is nowhere to sit and also insufficiently air conditioned:

The obligatory panoramic:

Here’s the kind of thing that we’re getting from AI today:

I wonder if instead we could get robot stonework so that modern buildings could be ornate and beautiful:

A couple of the pedestrian-only streets of the Baixa. Note the elevator to the Bairro Alto in the background of one photo:

To be continued…

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Return trip to the world’s best public aquarium (in Lisbon)

by philg

As part of this year’s trip to Portugal we bought a family membership at the Oceanário de Lisboa, which I think has a legitimate claim to being the world’s best public aquarium. The typical public aquarium is “one damn tank after another”. This was tweaked to “one damn tank after another plus a big tank in the middle” due to the work of Peter Chermayeff (fans of The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications will be cheered to learn that this accomplished architect is the son of Serge Chermayeff, an accomplished architect). Chattanooga is also a strong contender and is also a Chermayeff design, but the planted aquarium exhibit designed by the late Takashi Amano puts Lisbon over the top. (Atlanta, funded by Trump-supporter Bernie Marcus, has whale sharks, but lacks a unifying theme). Here are some photos from June 2024:

The “one ocean” theme is moderately persuasive, but the younger members of our party preferred the phrase “otter fight.”

I like the aquarium so much that I tried to book an apartment at the nearby Martinhal hotel, but I am glad that we didn’t. The #Science museum next to the aquarium is also great, but there isn’t enough going on in the Parque das Nações at street level. It would be a good hotel for someone who intended to be entirely car-based, but not for someone who wanted to walk to restaurants and shops. The Myriad, which is in the same new area of the city, is much better located for access to a lively pedestrian area (a riverfront restaurant row) and a massive shopping mall (as well as a big train/bus station). The failure of this neighborhood to be a pleasant walkable lifestyle, as most cities and towns in Portugal are, is a sobering reminder that humans don’t seem to be capable of building decent new neighborhoods. The countries that are addicted to population growth (e.g., the U.S., via low-skill immigration) are thus doomed to have an ever-larger percentage of the population living in lonely lifeless suburbs. Parque das Nações has moderately high density and is in a country with a rich tradition of urban planning (going back at least to reconstruction from the 1755 earthquake) and still it doesn’t come together.

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Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 6 (Abilene to Kentucky)

by philg

We didn’t start quite as early as planned in Abilene, but we managed to crank shortly after 8:00 am:

We flew over the Promised Land of free wind energy and then straight over the top of DFW:

You might think that it is rude to fly directly over one of the world’s busiest airports. However, that’s often exactly what the best controllers want you to do because airplanes don’t take off or land vertically and, therefore, a helicopter direct overhead doesn’t present a separation challenge.

We stopped at Galaxy FBO at KADS, one of the busiest general aviation airports serving Dallas. There, I received the happy news that inflation has been conquered by our wise leaders and their appointed technocrats in Washington, D.C. It is just that our used minivan keeps going up in price because it is so rare and desirable.

If you don’t like California’s lockdowns and 13.3% state income tax, it seems that they aren’t going to run out of houses in the Dallas suburbs any time soon:

From there, it was on into Arkansas and over the mountains to Mena (KMEZ) for lunch at Cruizzers Drive-In (better for sculpture than food):

Our next leg took us to Jonesboro, Arkansas (KJBR) for fuel and then across the Mississippi river to KCKV (“Outlaw Field” in Clarksville, Tennessee):

Our final leg was to KSME, Somerset, Kentucky, a truly magnificent facility:

At the Marriott, I wondered if they wouldn’t get more people to cooperate with their environmental goals with a sign reading, “Like Jeffrey Epstein, these towels aren’t going to hang themselves.”

Next: Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 7 (Kentucky to Great Barrington)

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Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 5 (trying to get through all of Hell and half of Texas)

by philg

Discouraged by reports of low clouds at various points along Interstate 10 and Interstate 20, but encouraged by forecasts of improving conditions, we launched from El Paso (KELP) to Van Horn, Texas (KVHN). The airport was deserted, but we managed to get the FBO guy on his cell phone and he popped right over to help us fuel the R44 from the pumps. The big users of this airport have been the U.S. Army with some drones and Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos with Gulfstreams and helicopters coming to see rocket launches (not stopping to chat with anyone at the airport).

We departed after refueling and, sure enough, the forecast great weather hadn’t materialized. As the highway climbed, the cloud deck didn’t move, which meant that the ceiling kept getting lower and lower. We hadn’t gone more than 10 minutes from KVHN before making the decision to do a 180-degree turn. We then called our FBO guy back to get the keys to the crew car and went into town for a truly great early dinner in a classic hotel:

After dinner… the same damn clouds. But they certainly didn’t look very high. Maybe we could go over them at 7,500′ and… we did! It’s unusual to fly over a cloud deck in a helicopter and if we’d had to do an autorotation to the highway it could have been challenging, but I have done autos on instruments in training. Anyway, the faithful Robinson never hiccupped so we made it over the last of the mountains and the broken cloud layer without incident and landed at Abilene just as it was getting dark. Abilene Aero lent us their crew car for the overnight hotel stay.

Next: Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 6 (Abilene to Kentucky)

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Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 4 (El Paso Interlude)

by philg

In Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 3 (They Built the Wall in Texas) we saw that man proposes and God disposes with respect to flying weather. Unable to proceed over the next batch of mountains, we enjoyed El Paso, Texas for about 26 hours.

Downtown El Paso seems to have been set up to serve Mexicans who came over for a day of shopping and then returned over the bridge. Here’s what it would look like to arrive from Ciudad Juárez:

After our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters from south of the border get through the 1950s-style shopping district, they arrive at the Square of the Sacred Rainbow Flag:

On the way they might pass this multi-story mountain lion (64 feet high!), fashioned from recycled trash by Bordalo Segundo of Portugal:

Inspired by the street art, it was time to duck into the (free) art museum. Meanwhile, I checked the radar to see whether we’d made a good decision (“sunk cost fallacy”?). From 2:30 pm:

The art museum had the usual stuff, plus an exhibit on Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, murdered by an embezzling employee who tried to hide her crime by claiming to have been sexually assaulted.

Here’s another temporary installation, a sculpture by Vanessa German:

Black Girl on Skateboard Going Where She’s Got to Go to Do What She’s Got to Do and It Might Not Have Anything to Do With You, Ever, 2022. Lemony things: vintage French beaded flowers, a yellow skateboard like I never had when i was a fat little Black girl in Los Angeles when riding a skateboard meant that you could fly, Capidomonte Ceramic Lemon Center piece, a dance in my thighs, high yellow so-flat paint, porcelain bird figurines, decorative resin lemons, papery yellow flowers, meanness transmuted, love, oil paint stick, rage, self-loathing transmuted, a joy-bitch, masturbation, plaster, wood glue, black pigment, giddiness, freedom in the body, freedom in the Soul, wood, tar, wire, a distinct and purposeful healing, hope, yellow flood light, heart, yellow decorative ceramic magnolia figurine, acceptance, abandon, not being afraid to be full of your own self in your own divine body, divinity, fear transmuted, plaster gauze, magic, silicone, tears, epoxy, water, tomorrow, now, yes.

Wandering around after the art museum, we happened on the Paso Del Norte, a hotel that put our Marriott to shame:

Some images of downtown, including the very first Kress store (part of the fortune built turned into the art museum and its collection). See if you can spot the Science-following photographer:

We enjoyed dinner at Tex-Mex institution L&J Cafe (1927), preceded by a walk in the grass-free graveyard:

Then it was time to enjoy El Paso by night, including a minor league baseball game (packed with enthusiastic spectators) and fireworks from our hotel’s pool deck:

The next morning I did my annual visit to the gym and also looked out from the pool deck:

Speaking of the gym, they still had their coronapanic signs up. Is there any kind of procedure for taking these safety notices down?

To undo any negative effects from the gym, we hit the Glazy Donut on the way out of town. Note how easily Internet content can be corrupted:

Then it was back to the airport where the skies were clear at least to the next stop (Van Horn, Texas) and forecast to improve beyond Van Horn:

Next: Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 5 (trying to get through all of Hell and half of Texas)

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Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 3 (They Built the Wall in Texas)

by philg

Our story picks up again on an April Saturday morning in Tucson. When checked the previous night, the forecast weather beyond El Paso was a combination of ugly and iffy. Despite the weather forecast and having flown 5 hours (collective-cracked time, so closer to 6 hours of rotor-spinning time), we were at the airport a little after 7:00 am.

After weight gained via the previous night’s Sonoran hot dogs it would have been nice to steal this civilian Blackhawk with which we shared the ramp (they were dropping supplies into the forest for powerline construction):

Here’s Interstate 10 climbing over some of the hills in southern New Mexico. It is possible to do the trip at 5,500′, the highest elevation that we must fly in order to bring a helicopter from coast to coast along I-10:

We stopped for the bathroom and found some porn for pilots:

Due to a slight headwind, we couldn’t make it to El Paso on one tank. We stopped in Las Cruces for fuel and on-airport bbq:

Once we arrived in El Paso, just after noon and having flown only three hours from Tucson, we discovered that the forecast wall of bad weather in Texas was, in fact, impenetrable by prospective helicopter migrants. My copilot wanted to press on, pointing out that conditions weren’t so bad at various airports to the northeast, e.g., 1200′ ceilings were available in Carlsbad (elevation 3295′). I reminded him that we’d have to climb above 8,000′ to clear the mountains between El Paso and Carlsbad and that the 1200′ ceiling wasn’t going to follow the terrain. It hadn’t occurred to him that airports tend to be built at the lowest elevations in a region, not on hilltops or mountaintops. (He had more than 500 hours of airplane time and nearly 200 hours of helicopter time so I can’t explain this gap in knowledge.)

Million Air KELP is a favorite spot for military instructors and students. It’s also a great place to make sure that you don’t get sunburned when transferring from your pavement-melting SUV into your Greta Thunberg-approved Gulfstream:

We headed downtown:

More about El Paso in our next thrilling installment… Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 4 (El Paso Interlude)

Related:

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Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 2 (Davis-Monthan boneyard)

by philg

Follow-up to Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 1…

We actually did this before landing in Tucson and enjoying Sonoran hot dogs at “EGC”… an orbit of Davis–Monthan Air Force Base. The military wasn’t doing any flying at 5 pm on a Friday afternoon, so I figured that the tower controller would either tell us to stay out or invite us to come in and do whatever we wanted. Instead, the controller approved one orbit of the famous boneyard. Why not two orbits? I should have summoned the courage to ask!

Here’s the part of the base that supports actively flying aircraft:

And then your choice of aircraft for any size family:

Note the A-10 Warthogs at bottom right if there is any need for domestic violence.

Here’s your fearful narrator enjoying the scene:

(Note the T-shirt from this year’s Sun ‘n Fun)

If you believe in “Peace, the old-fashioned way”… the B-1 bomber (sad about the reflection; it would have been better to land and take the door off and then take off again and yet better if Robinson would add a sliding photo window to the piston-powered machines that are now up to $750,000):

Not sure if this one is coming in or going out:

An overview…

And another wide image…

Tune in next time to see what we did about the following:

Notes: Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 3 (They Built the Wall in Texas)

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Miami Grand Prix experience (the “Heat Stroke F1”)

by philg

Formula 1 is an all-day three-day event. Consequently, a seat in a grandstand will become more like a prison after a while, unlike if you were attending a 2-hour game. In Las Vegas (see Nine minutes of Formula 1 glory at the Las Vegas Grand Prix) our ticket gave us access only to a small area where we could get food, use the waterless porta-potties, or walk to the grandstand. In Miami, a standard ticket gives the holder access to an entire campus (albeit only one grandstand) and thus there is a lot more to see and do. having the massive football stadium at the center of the campus is valuable because it is possible to ride an escalator up to the third floor of the stadium, walk around, see the track from above, eat from a non-temporary kitchen, use a non-temporary bathroom, etc. (Even the temporary rest room facilities in Miami, unlike in Vegas, were water-based and had water for handwashing.)

Despite my fears of being roasted and steamed to death, the weather forecast for the weekend was highs of 83 degrees and partly cloudy.

Given the inevitability of traffic and high-cost parking, the obvious way to get to the event is Lyft/Uber to the front door. However, it turns out that these services dump people a 20-minute walk from the stadium on big event days and may not be easy to find afterwards. I paid $84 for a resale Saturday-only parking ticket on the north side of the stadium, of which $25 was in SeatGeek fees:

I told my companion “I guarantee that, after parking, we will walk by businesses and individuals selling parking for less than half of what we paid.” Sure enough, the modest neighborhood to the north of the stadium had families selling driveway parking for $35-50 (see below). Lot 34 still ended up being a good choice because they open an exit at the NW corner. Although we left at the precise peak time, right after the final qualifying round, we didn’t wait to get out of the parking lot and suffered through no more than about 10 minutes of additional traffic compared to a best-case scenario.

It was a 20-minute walk to the entrance gate from Lot 34. If one were headed back toward Miami, probably the smart thing to do would be independent parking on the south side of the stadium (lots of businesses there with big lots) and, if departing at a peak time, stop at a restaurant for dinner before heading out on the road.

Security check (no bags or food allowed, basically, and we heard some vague mumbling about camera lenses no longer than 6 inches) and ticket check was quick. Bring in a sealed bottle of water and then there are free refill stations all over the venue. Also bring earplugs for the Porsche races and for the F1 qualifying (you can just put your fingers in your ears as the pack of cars goes by in an F1 race).

I was instructed to pick some drivers to root for. After hearing their biographies, I decided that my loyalties are to Logan Sargeant, a 23-year-old Floridian who drives for Williams, Yuki Tsunoda, a 23-year-old from Japan who drives for Red Bull’s second team (“RB”) because I love Japan, and Max Verstappen, the 26-year-old champion who reminds me of my Dutch friend Max (he’s against big government and low-skill migrants).

The “West Campus” features about 15 restaurants and a popular F1 merchandise store. People actually waited in line for the chance to buy $75-100 T-shirts:

The shopper in the middle photo told me that everything is cheaper online and, in fact, the orange T-shirt above for which people were paying $75 at the event was quoted at $42, not on sale, on the official F1 store web site. The $80 black shirt, however, wasn’t available online when I checked, so maybe that’s why people are desperate to shop at the event. The truly great hat shown below wasn’t for sale:

There was quite a bit of shaded seating for eating and drinking. My Twitter post, which nobody thought was funny:

Here’s a view of the grandstand taken from the 3rd floor of the stadium:

Our Turn 18 grandstand seats ($180 resale plus a forest of fees) weren’t all that interesting. We never saw a change in position, an accident, or anything else other than people decelerate (far away) and then come slowly out of tight turn (close). Row M is the best in this grandstand due to being shaded and yet just in front of the columns that hold up the shade structure. Later in the day, at least six rows below M will also be shaded on the west side of the grandstand. Here are photos at noon showing that L and M are shaded followed by two photos at 4 pm showing that the west part of the grandstand has a much more favorable angle than the east part (by 2 pm, even row I was shaded on the west side):

The aviation story for the event is a temporary flight restriction from 0-1000′, which is perhaps just as well considering the proximity of 1050′-high towers right next to the stadium.

An AStar (“Airbus H130”) flew tight maneuvers, often substantially sideways, over the more important races. I’m surprised that this made more sense than using drones to get dramatic aerial footage of the race. A drone operator on top of the stadium would have been able to see the aircraft at all times and a camera operator could have manipulated the camera angle. Maybe the camera in the ball underneath the AStar can be heavier, but is a huge sensor and lens necessary for taking pictures under the bright Miami skies? A Robinson R44 also flew over the course from time to time and the Hard Rock’s Sikorsky S-76 ferried VIPs in and out. I’m sure the folks in the AStar got some better images that we did from our seats! iPhone at “3X”:

I’m not sure why Ferrari wants to participate in Formula 1. Isn’t the main take-away “A beverage company makes faster cars than we do and, also, quite a few cans of energy drinks”? Also, the Ferrari team is now sponsored by HP, which leads to a color clash and confusion in my brain. Why do tech companies get so much value out of F1 sponsorship? Shouldn’t it be consumer products companies that could get the most return on investment? How many people at a Formula 1 event are in the market for something from Oracle, Cisco, or HP? Who decides to use Oracle instead of SAP or SQL Server because Oracle sponsors the Red Bull team?

The restricted-by-gender-ID “F1 Academy” race was more exciting than the standard F1 open-to-all-genders events. The drivers all have the same car model and, therefore, nobody has a technical advantage. This makes it tougher to forecast the winner in advance. The lack of experience among the female-identifying drivers also makes the race more exciting. In the 13-lap race that we saw (drivers who fail to identify as “women” are forced to race for 19 laps (sprint) or 57 laps (full F1 race)), there were stalls during the start (failure to use manual transmission properly), sideways departures from the track in curves, and at least one crash against the side wall (nobody injured, fortunately). Despite the low level of experience among the drivers, big companies such as Cisco and Google pour in sponsorship money. The announcers give the drivers credit for every action, even if the action is a mistake, and note that “they’re learning so much.” Chloe Chambers, age 19 and born in China, was given credit for being adopted and also for living in a “multi-racial” family. Wikipedia says that in an all-gender Formula 4 contest she finished #26 (perhaps she was the top driver who identified as “female”?). Drivers who don’t identify as “female” at the Formula 4 level would be lucky to enjoy 100 spectators at an event, but the “F1 Academy” race was watched by tens of thousands, sandwiched as it was between all-gender F1 events.

The lines for food seem to get long from 1-3 pm as fan hunger overpowers resistance to paying $30 per person for lunch. Here’s the line for $23 personal-size pizza:

Frosted lemonade was $12, a burger $20, and tacos were $10 each. As noted above, the ability to walk around inside the stadium is valuable and offers fun views of racing and the fan zones:

Some car dealers brought their wares. Here’s a Koenigsegg:

Some porn for Californians from the drive back… gasoline at $3.46/gallon right next to the Palm Beach International Airport:

It was a good day and wasn’t too brutal for either sun or noise, but I wouldn’t have wanted to go back the next day for the real race (better to watch on TV). Although the crowds were managed well, it was still a crowded environment from the moment you left your car to the moment you got back. One day wasn’t quite long enough to explore all of the fan areas, but it was still enough for one year. Maybe I would feel differently if they used a Honda Odyssey as a pace car.

The Apple Watch’s summary of the event:

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