The Netherlands/Belgium Today’s note is all about Carol’s and my trip to the Netherlands and Belgium. I have two newsletters. One focuses on finance and travel. The second focuses on racing and travel. I hope that everyone reading this has an interest in travel and/or racing and maybe a little bit of interest in how to finance it all. I often say that trackchasing is the match that “lights the fire” for these trips. Our trip will be for 13 days. We plan to visit five racetracks. I expect we will be at those racetracks for 10-15 hours in total. I also often say to Carol that there’s not a lot of “track” in her trackchasing trips. She gets a kick out of my sayings (my words), that she has heard thousands of times.
For those that read this and think about the financial considerations of a trip like this, I offer this counsel. Look at your birthdate. Look at your bank account. Then remember that 99.81% of things that most people worry about never happen including financial worries. If you are older and you have some money in the bank this basketball analogy applies. You are in the fourth quarter and leading the game. Very few teams who lead late in the game lose the friggin’ game. Yes, folks cheering for the team that is leading the game often WORRY they will lose the lead and lose the game but that rarely happens. Don’t send me an email telling me you know of one time that the team leading lost. I’m talking about leading by 20 points with three minutes to go. Don’t be a worry wart. As an example, if you didn’t spend twenty bucks today because you didn’t think you could afford it, then you in all likelihood deprived yourself of a pleasure of some sort. If you die in the future, which most of us will, and that twenty bucks was the difference in your net worth being positive or negative at death, then you made the RIGHT decision not to spend that money. Most people worry about running out of money before they run out of life. Most people who think that way are wrong. How many older people do you personally know that died with a negative net worth? Nobody? If you have some money and are older, then you need to be taking a trip, or spending that money on something or someone that will give you joy before you check out.
On the other hand, if you are younger and/or don’t have any money in the bank then you need to figure out how to change that so you can go on trips like this or spend your money on something or someone that will give you joy before you check out. Remember these few things. “Bank” doesn’t really mean “bank”. “Check out” means you died. “Fourth quarter” means the last quarter of your life. Very few of us go into life’s “overtime”. Dying with a lot of money in the bank and with little in the way of life experiences means you won the game by a very wide margin but didn’t put the subs in. Nobody likes someone who managed their game like that. Don’t understand any of this? Then I guess you’re not a sports fan. Folks, there are financial lessons to be learned from all of this. Without further adieu, let’s get started. I hope, at a minimum, that you get a travel tip or a trackchasing idea or you simply enjoy the common experiences that we had on this trip with your own worldwide adventures. I put quite a bit of time into planning these trips before we leave on the journey. At the same time, I understand the need for maximum flexibility once we hit the road. I have a plan, but if a better plan comes up at any point in time I’m all about the better plan. I am not loyal to advance plans. The first thing I needed to do was to find out if there were any new racetracks I could visit in Europe. When I discovered that some of my best opportunities existed in the Netherlands and Belgium, those two countries became this trip’s destination. The internet certainly helps me figure the racing thing out, as well as most other items on the trip. I did all of this travel in pre-Internet days, but I don’t exactly remember how I did it! What I try to do in the pre-planning stages is to recruit some local people who are on the ground, and who might be willing to share their racing knowledge with me. I’ve had a lot of success doing that in the past. I’ve made some very good friends, whom I get a chance to stay in touch with from all over the world. That’s one of the very best things about my hobby of trackchasing.
The first guy I came in contact with was a German. His name was Hartmut Schrimpf (above left) who went by the nickname of “Bernie”. If I had to guess I would tell you that Bernie and I shared well over 100 Facebook Messager messages as he did his very best to help me out with racing times and locations. Then, a fellow from Belgium, who prefers to remain under the radar, came into my online life. I will call him Burt. Burt just like Bernie was excellent. He really put a lot of time and effort into giving me precise race locations and schedule times and a whole lot more. Some might think this was the Randy and Carol show. I know that in the background this was as much the Bernie and Burt show as anything else. I can’t thank those folks enough. I didn’t get a chance to meet either one of these people personally, but I sure hope that I do in the future. After the racing plan was tentatively set up, I began to research airfare. I have now made four trips to Europe this year. Carol joined me on two of those vacations. We have one more trip to Europe coming up next month. What did I learn from all of this? Traveling to Europe isn’t all that much more difficult or expensive than if you live in Florida and want to vacation in California. Or if you live in Washington and want to vacation in Mississippi. The airfare is going to be just a little bit more. The gasoline prices are going to be quite a bit more. However, hotels and food and entertainment aren’t going to cost you much more in Amsterdam or Brussels than if you had visited Miami or Los Angeles. If you’ve already been to Miami and Los Angeles enough in your life, maybe it’s time to check out Amsterdam or Brussels or anywhere else in the world that suits your fancy.
During my business career, I clocked more than 6,000,000 miles on American Airlines. I think I have about 150,000 of those miles left. When Carol and I and our three children were traveling as a family we could eat up most of those six million miles pretty quickly using frequent flyer tickets. If I can, I’m going to want to fly on American Airlines, or one of their partners on these trips for a few reasons. When I retired they conveniently game me lifetime “platinum” status. Thank you, AA!
With American, we will be able to check bags for free. We will get preferred seating on the plane. Importantly, we will be able to use their airline clubs coming and going. Just being able to relax and eat and drink whatever you want on the house makes American Airlines fares, which can sometimes be a little bit higher than others, the lowest priced “value” idea.
For our rental cars, I use a company called AutoEurope. I’ve had some really good experiences with those people. They are very good at letting me compare all of the leading rental car companies in major European cities. I can make my selections, which might include things like an automatic transmission (I sometimes rent manual transmission cars), unlimited miles, and a few other things. I get the exact price and know that I’m getting the best price out of five or six different rental car companies. I have to be honest. When Carol comes along on the trip it’s just a little bit different than I if I were by myself. I don’t mean to be sexist, but if four guys are playing golf, the conversation is going to be just a little bit different than if three guys and a woman are part of the foursome. That’s just the world we live in. Someone made a lot of money with a similar discussion of the topic when they wrote the book, “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”. I like it that way. When Carol comes along, I’m going to organize a trip that has a little bit less driving. My selection of hotels is going to be just a little bit more upscale. Most of my decisions for the entire trip are going to be based on her comfort and enjoyment. I guess that’s what a loving husband should be doing, right? Left to my own devices I might not reserve a hotel until the day I needed one. That’s how I do it when I travel in the United States by myself. I prefer maximum flexibility and non-refundable hotels or non-refundable anything does NOT provide maximum flexibility. However, on this trip, most of the days would not involve racing. We would have four nights in Amsterdam. We would stay for a couple of nights in the Brussels area, along with several other random locations.
To make things just a little bit easier I went with Marriott branded hotels as often as I could. I’m not really sure I recommend that. Carol and I went to India once. We had a friend from England, who gave us all kinds of advice because she had been to India nearly 50 times. I had a plan where I was going to use Sheraton hotels exclusively. Our travel friend talked me out of that. She recommended Indian hotels that were on an identical quality level to Sheraton properties. We split that trip up with about half Sheratons and have upscale Indian branded properties. In hindsight that was one of the best ideas I’ve ever gotten from someone else regarding travel. With the Marriott hotels, I pretty much knew what we would get. As a titanium elite member of the Marriott frequent stay program, I commonly get upgraded, we get lots of free stuff, and generally, very much enjoy the experience. I actually found Marriot branded hotels, primarily Residence Inn properties, to be very reasonably priced during our stay in Europe.
Oh, before I get into our actual Netherlands/Belgium experiences I wanted to share with you a comment I made about the trip that Carol and I made to Belgium in 2005. “I believe it’s important to have a spouse who can operate independently when necessary. One of the qualifying questions I asked Carol when interviewing prospective spouses some 33 years ago was this one. “If I asked you to meet me in Brussels a week from Thursday, could you do it”? Carol answered “Yes” and she got the job. Actually, I didn’t ask that question of Carol before we were married, but I knew she could do it. I believe she asked me, “Can you support me in a manner to which I would like to become accustomed?” Actually, she may not have asked me that question either. She already knew the answer.” Oh! One more comment about hotels. For this trip, I found a place in Middelkerke, Belgium called the “Domain 10”. This sounded like a very exotic overnight location. Their website kept saying that the room came with a “secret butler”. The drawback was that check-in was not allowed until 9 p.m. 9 p.m.? I have stayed in hotels for more than 5,000 nights in my life. I have never encountered a 9 p.m. check-in time. Yes, we could check in earlier but there was a €25 per hour charge for doing so. I explained the situation to Carol. She thought it sounded “creepy”. Whenever Carol concludes that something is creepy or its equivalent that idea is not going to fly so we didn’t stay at Domain 10. Think you might like this place? Here’s the link, “Domain 10 – Middelkerke, Belgium. Thursday, September 1, 2022 My trackchasing exploits in 2022 have taken me to 17 states, 9 countries, 2 two Canadian provinces and 1 Mexican state. That’s actually about normal for me. This kind of travel is something I’ve done for each one of the 21 years that I’ve been retired. We had our passports with us as you might expect. They expire in 2024 so will be going through the renewal process in the next little bit. The passport I had before my current one required that I add 48 additional pages to handle all of the international country stamps I had gotten.
We also brought along our Covid vaccine information. I have mine in electronic form on my iPhone. I am happy to report that we didn’t really encounter any significant impacts from Covid or Covid restrictions. We didn’t wear a mask one time during the entire trip. We did see a few people, maybe 3-5%, wearing masks. We also have Global Entry and TSA pre-check capabilities. This program started more than 10 years ago. If you’re going to do very much traveling, especially internationally, I can’t recommend Global Entry highly enough. I renewed my GE membership just two weeks ago. I simply went online and made my renewal ($100 for five years and reimbursed by my Visa credit card). I was approved and got my new card in space of about two weeks. Carol’s renewal request is still pending. I have a goal of walking a minimum of 4 miles every day. My mileage is tracked by my iPhone. All of my results are based on the California, Pacific time zone. That means if I travel to Europe, which is nine hours ahead of California when I get back home everything I did in Europe will be re-calculated to California times. The challenge with that is that I might walk 4 miles each day in Europe but during a 48-hour maybe six of those miles would be in one California day and only 2 miles on the second California day. My goal is to walk at least 4 miles EVERY day in California using their time zone. This required some creativity on my part to make this goal continue to happen as it has for the past seven months.
With the above being the case, I needed to get up at 4 a.m. on our departure morning to get two of my four miles of walking out of the way. I did the walking indoors, in the Ranlay Events Center aka the REC. Then Carol and I implemented our normal routine of leaving our modest seaside cottage in San Clemente and boarding an airplane to wherever we may be going. What is that routine? The Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is 65 miles to our north. We make that drive and I drop Carol at the terminal with whatever checked bags we might have. When I travel in the U.S. I never check any bags. While she is doing that, I drive back to our parking garage and walk more than a mile from the garage to the terminal. Our son J.J.’s car is being repaired right now so he gets to use our Tesla Model X while we’re gone on these trips. I always try to leave three hours before our flight is scheduled to depart. It is amazing how quickly those three hours can fly by. Get it? See what I did there? Fly by? Let’s move on. We had enough time for breakfast at the LAX Admiral’s Club. That was nice. Then we took a three-hour flight from Los Angeles to Dallas and connected from Dallas to Amsterdam for a 10-hour flight and a nine-hour time zone change. Our flights were for the most part uneventful. We flew in coach. I was able to select our seats at no extra charge using the American website to get preferred locations with extra legroom again in coach. I am not a big supporter of using business class or first class if I have to buy the tickets myself, for trips to Europe or really anywhere. I find coach seating to be perfectly acceptable. I also find first class/business class to be an expense that is of little value to me. Don’t get me wrong. I love flying “up front” but I don’t love it enough to pay for it. When we are on these long flights, Carol uses the airplane’s entertainment system. On the other hand, I use my iPad, where I have downloaded TV and movie selections from Netflix. That way I get to enjoy the exact programs that I might watch at home on my own timing. Friday, September 2, 2022.
We landed in Amsterdam at 9 a.m. We cleared customs easily, as we almost always do. I always take pictures like the above in Amsterdam although Carol continues to warn me not to. Our checked bags came quickly. We were able to roll our bags easily over to the Hertz Rental Car location which was located inside the terminal at the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol known informally as Schiphol Airport. It was nearly a mile walk. That’s no problem for us. We are in good shape. Remember what I said earlier about being in the “fourth quarter” of the “game”? If you wait too long to do this kind of stuff, time will run out. You might not be “checked out” of the game of life but if you can’t do stuff because you waited too long then you screwed up…that would be my opinion.
We ended up getting a Mercedes CLA four-door sedan rental car. The car was beautiful with only about 5,000 miles on the odometer. The controls were a bit hard to navigate. The car would end up riding very quietly and smoothly during our entire trip where we drove 1,987 kilometers in 13 days. That’s actually a very low driving total for us on these kinds of outings. There was one significant drawback to the Mercedes. It was a low-slung car. My 6’3” frame doesn’t bend as easily as it once did. This made it very difficult for me to get in and out of the car. I could help myself by using my left hand to push my head into the cockpit but it wasn’t a very comfortable experience. The car had its own GPS system. On the first day or two of the trip, we used it exclusively. Then it began to act just a little bit wonky. At that point, I didn’t trust it anymore. I would end up using Google Maps on my iPhone for the rest of the trip. Normally I held the phone in my right hand and drove with my left hand, which is a very common experience for me. When this trip finishes up, I will have driven a little bit more than 24,000 miles in rental cars this year and only about 7,000 miles with my personal car.
I use the AT&T International Day Pass for my phone when I travel internationally. The cost is $10 a day. This allows my phone to act just as if I were in San Clemente. That means I can use my iPhone for phone calls back to the United States, and anywhere in the country I am visiting at no charge whatsoever. Probably the most important feature of my iPhone foreign country usage is the GPS capability. I can also text and check email and do everything else that my iPhone would do back home. I find the $10 daily expense to be the best value of anything that I am likely to buy the entire trip. I mentioned we had landed in Amsterdam at 9 a.m. By the time we had our bags and rental car it was probably around 11 a.m. With the time zone change that would make it 2 a.m. in California. Most people are sleeping at 2 a.m. However, our day was pretty much just beginning. We had a two-hour drive down to our hotel. The kid at Hertz who tried to help us connect my iPhone to the rental car’s audio system (even he couldn’t do it) told us there were no toll roads in The Netherlands or Belgium. That was mostly true! Traffic was light. I was impressed with all of the solar arrays that I saw during the drive. We would continue to see the use of solar and wind machines, probably more heavily in the two countries we were visiting, than anything I’ve seen in the United States. Most flights from the United States to Europe land in the morning. I feel one of the biggest challenges for United States tourists when they come to Europe on that very first day is to try to stay up until at least dinner time and beyond. That is very difficult to do. If you land at 9 a.m. like we did, by the time you get your bags and rental car and the rest of it and the adrenaline wears off, you’re going to want to take a nap in the middle of the afternoon. You’re probably gonna want to sleep for several hours during one of these naps. Why? Because you didn’t sleep much on the plane and it’s the middle of the night “your” time even though it’s the middle of the afternoon in Europe. If you do that, and I know this from experience, when it gets to the more traditional bedtime later in the day Europe time, you’re not going to want to sleep. Once you get into that cycle of sleeping every afternoon for two hours or more, it’s really going to mess with your normal 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. or so sleep cycle. It’s much easier to say you’re not going to do that than it is to actually do it.
When we got to the hotel, the Hotel Cuijk in Nijmegen, Netherlands, we had the perfect lunch in the hotel’s dining room. I’m typically not much for eating in hotels, but this hotel was a little bit out in the boonies. Their restaurant turned out to produce one of the best meals we had on the entire trip. Following lunch, I went for a power walk. It was then that I began to discover that the use of the bicycle in the Netherlands in Belgium, dwarfs the use of the bicycle anywhere else in the world. I’ll talk more about that later. Speaking of lunch at the hotel…I am a Coke Zero/Diet Coke addict. These drinks are expensive in Europe. A small 300 ml (10 oz.) glass bottle of Coke Zero might go for 4-5 euros in a restaurant. There are no free refills. At a convenience store, a larger plastic bottle of this drink will sell for nearly three euros. I wouldn’t be surprised if I dropped at least 150 euros just on Coke Zero on this trip. That’s what an addict does. I still had some walking to do to meet my daily goal. When I got back to the hotel after my walk, I could see that Carol was tending toward an afternoon nap. I couldn’t believe she wanted to do that. Soon I was napping beside her! We probably slept for three or four hours. I was equally surprised that we got up and had a little bit of dinner. Then we were able to go back to sleep for eight or nine hours overnight. I think all of that rest helped us begin the first full day of our European adventure in pretty good shape.
Saturday, September 3, 2022.
I woke up early to take a morning power walk through some local farms and a Netherlands residential neighborhood. There was so much to see! If you want to view what I saw during this powerwalk, you’ll be able to click on one of my SmugMug photo albums and do just that. Virtually everywhere we went in these two countries things were spotless. The homes were mainly made of brick, and very well-maintained.
The hotel buffet breakfast was excellent as was the case with virtually all of our hotels. I have just come off of a five-month Nutrisystem eating plan. I know what 300-400 calories look like. The hotel buffet looked like a LOT more calories than I was used to. Mentally, this was problematic. Nevertheless, I reminded myself that I was on a European vacation. The Nutrisystem eating plan was going to have to take a backseat for the next couple of weeks. By the way that’s a honeycomb pictured above.
Today’s racing location in Siebengewald, Netherlands was a quick 25-minute drive from our hotel. That’s the outcome of some of my advanced planning spent in the office of Randy Lewis Racing back in San Clemente, California.
We were here to see “autocross” racing. If you don’t know what that is, imagine a farmer’s field where all the corn stocks have been mowed down and everything is flat. Then imagine very basic “junk” cars with souped-up engines racing on either an oval or a road course configuration in the dirt farm field. Yep. If you have concluded this is not Daytona or Indianapolis, you are absolutely correct. However, in the hobby of trackchasing, every track in the world counts the same. We arrived early and bought our tickets for €10 each. Yes, both Netherlands and Belgium use euros as their official currency. Right now, the dollar is so strong that one dollar equals about one euro. In the past, one dollar would only get you about 80% of a euro. That’s another reason, the strong U.S. dollar, for folks to be visiting Europe right now. We were about two hours early for today’s racing. There was no need to wait for two hours in a Netherlands cornfield for this kind of racing to begin. We drove into the city center of Siebengewald.
We did something I love to do. That’s touring foreign grocery stores. I just like seeing how things are merchandised so differently and what the local offerings, including the packaging, look like. People were doing their normal Saturday morning grocery store shopping. We were there simply to see what kinds of products were available and what the packaging looked like. It was a grand tour. We bought a little bit of black licorice for our daughter, Kristy, who loves the salty stuff. At least I remembered she used to like the salty stuff. We bought some as a gift. I couldn’t believe how many licorice products were in the store. After a light lunch at a local eatery, we were back at the track.
Upon our return to the racetrack, we met a fellow by the name of Karl who was selling the race tickets. He spoke English well and followed us over to our parking spot. We talked for several minutes and enjoyed the international camaraderie that comes with meeting people who have grown up in a culture not all that similar to our own. We took a tour of the pit area. With a temperature of 85° and a blue sky, it was just a little bit warm. There were probably 60-80 racing cars in the pit area. They started a bit late but that wasn’t a problem for us. A bigger issue might have been the fact that the public address announcer made all of his announcements in the Dutch language. Of course, that was to be expected but it did diminish our enjoyment of the entire event a bit. Since it was difficult to get any verbal indications of what the plan was today, we relied only on our eyesight.
I mentioned that a fellow by the name of Bernie from Germany had helped me with advance planning for the racing part of the trip. Bernie’s friend Roland Sudniks, who is a noted German stock car driver was in attendance today. Roland and his wife Christa came up to say hello. The only problem was they didn’t speak virtually a word of English. We didn’t speak a word of German, We just nodded, smiled and shook hands and were happy to meet each other. With today’s racing in a farmer’s field, the racing surface was a little bit rough. There were lots of flips and lots of disabled cars to remove after each short, five or six-lap race. They only race here once a year on both Saturday and Sunday each September. We needed tokens to buy food and beer. They use that system to keep people from stealing. Imagine if there was a world where stealing didn’t exist. What would happen then? We would have a huge unemployment rate! The people who sold the tokens were not exactly in lockstep with the people who sold the beer and brats. This was complicated even further for us by the language barrier. Nevertheless, we were persistent and drank some beer and ate some brats!
We would come to find out that what some people think of as public toilets are actually public toilets with a surcharge attached to them. Today at the race it cost €0.50 cents to use the porta potties. We would end up stopping at gas stations and convenience stores where the permanent convenience store restrooms cost €0.70 or €0.80 cents. Those toilets came with a €0.50 coupon that could be redeemed on purchases inside the store. After a while, I started thinking that we were getting something for free with the 50% restroom coupon but of course,,.we were not.
Of course, I made a YouTube video from this weekend’s trackchasing. One video covers all three tracks we were able to visit. Don’t miss it. Here’s the link.
I have long thought that the Welcome Centers in the United Kingdom are the best highway rest areas anywhere in the world. I still think that. However, in the Netherlands and Belgium, they have rest areas about every 10 or 15 km it seems that offer a place to pull over. These stops normally a gas station/convenience store. The United States certainly has its system of interstate highway rest areas, but those rarely include anything other than a bathroom and a few vending machines. I found the ability to stop at a gas station/convenience store as frequently as needed to be a very outstanding travel feature. I was happy that we could use the smartphone app, “Yelp” to find restaurants in the cities that we visited. We used Yelp to find an Italian restaurant in the downtown city of Ghent, Belgium. With Yelp and the directions that we could use with GPS, everything was quite a bit more convenient. We needed to use a downtown parking garage in Ghent. Initially, the process of getting in and out of the garage was just a little bit daunting. All of the instructions were in Dutch! However, like most things that involve a learning curve, we figured it out, after a little bit of bumping and grinding. We could pay for our parking at a machine by simply punching in our license plate number. Then we could exit after we had paid with no ticket or anything like that because the system recognized our license plate. From the restaurant and a little bit of walking around the old town section of Ghent, we checked into the Residence Inn. They gave us an upgrade. We ended up listening to the UCLA – Bowling Green football game via Sirius XM radio for a very complete day.
Sunday, September 4, 2022. We are now in Belgium. We trackchased in The Netherlands yesterday. Today we will see racing at two different tracks in Belgium. Coming into this trip I had seen racing at three Belgium tracks and fourteen in The Netherlands. When the trip wraps up, I expect my totals to be seven Belgium tracks and fifteen Netherlands tracks. Overall, I have seen racing in 86 different countries at about 450 international race tracks. The first track in Kooigem, Belgium was easy to find. Again, this was autocross racing in a farmer’s field. Of the five tracks we plan to visit on this trip all of them will feature autocross racing with the exception of a trip to Circuit Zolder in Belgium. Circuit Zolder used to be a world Formula One track back in the 70s and 80s. I’m looking forward to Zolder.
The racing at Kooigem included what I would call junk cars with souped-up motors. There were some dune buggy-type classes as well.
It was interesting to see the safety roll cages in a couple of the cars. These were not the steel tubing safety roll cages that you would see in virtually every race car in the world. Some car builders had used 4 x 4 WOODEN posts to support things. I’ve seen racing at more places than anybody else. But I have never seen wooden roll cages! Once again, the 50 euro cent porta potties were available. We didn’t try them. We knew that gas station/convenience store comfort facilities would be better. Those restroom opportunities were nearby. I did not grow up on a farm. I don’t know very much about cornfields. However, after today’s visit to Kooigem, I know that walking in cornfields where the stocks have been cut down to a height of about 4 inches is not that friendly for Zappos purchased brand new athletic shoes. These short, what I am calling corn stocks, have the consistency of a wire brush. My Hertz Rental Car Racing Mercedes CLA was begging for mercy as well as we drove to our parking spot. I never take too much of your time to talk about the actual racing we see. Why? I think you can get the best understanding of the cars and the track and the racing by viewing my YouTube video and seeing the photos of the cars, the pit area, and everything else we encountered. We good?
When the racing was finished for us, we made a 90-minute drive over to a small Belgium town called Hoegaarden. I have to say this might have been the worst viewing track of the three we have visited this weekend. It was very dry, dusty and windy everywhere we went. Carol is not a fan of dust. I can’t say that I am either. At one point when I still had some racetrack touring to complete, I put Carol back in the car to enjoy the air-conditioned comfort while I went exploring. However, because of the environmentalist/financially conservative person that she is Carol wanted to lower the windows. She figured this would save on gas by not running the car’s AC and burning nearly $8 a gallon gasoline. I would hear nothing of that. If we lowered the windows in these dusty confines, we would be eating and touching dust for the rest of our trip in the brand new interior of the Mercedes. Then Hertz would charge us a $250 cleaning fee. No, I made her swear on a stack of Bibles, that she would not lower the windows and would simply sit there and enjoy the air conditioning.
When the day’s racing was finished, we headed to nearby Grimbergen, Belgium located just ten miles north of Brussels. We want to have a meal at the II Casale (Ilcasale) Italian restaurant. We ate at this restaurant 17 years ago with Belgium trackchaser Roland Vanden Eynde. Our experience had been so great so long ago that we wanted to try to replicate it. As luck would have it the restaurant would not be opening until 6 p.m. As even better luck would have it the small town was holding its annual celebration. This featured a large carnival and a festive atmosphere. After I searched and searched for a parking spot…and we walked around on a surface better than four-inch corn stalks we found a park bench in the shade and enjoyed some adult beverages…and waited for 6 p.m. to come around. Did we remember the restaurant’s surroundings after 17 years? No, we did not. I commonly re-visit racetracks after similar periods of time have elapsed. Do I usually remember the detail of those places? No, I do not. Do I think of this as a problem? No, I do not. A lot of water passes under our travel bridges from one spot to the next. However, if I really do want to remember what happened a very long time ago I can simply check out a past Trackchaser Report! The Italian food was good. We dined on linquini with clams and spaghetti carbonara. However, it wasn’t quite the same as we had remembered the experience from seventeen years ago. You can go home but it might not be the same. That trackchasing trip to Belgium in 2005 was the first European racing trip I had ever done. The above mentioned Roland Vanden Eynde acted as our guide and navigator. Back in those days, which was primarily pre-GPS and pre-internet to some degree, just finding the race tracks was a major challenge. Roland’s input was indispensable. I really appreciated everything he did for us on that trip. However, I learned something from that first trip. Although Roland was as helpful as any human being could possibly be I decided that I did not want to take trips that were led and guided by someone else. I wanted to make my own decisions. I wanted to decide where to eat, when to turn left, and when to turn right. I have never sought the personal one-on-one guidance from anyone else after that first trip. I will make mistakes when planning and implementing these trips but at least I know they were my mistakes. I can live with that.
On the way back to the hotel we filled up the Mercedes. Gasoline was selling for $6.52 a gallon. I computed that our car gave us 41.2 miles per gallon in fuel economy. I wondered if a six-cylinder Mercedes gets that kind of fuel efficiency in the United States. I didn’t think so. If I’m right why would that be? Right now, gasoline in the U.S. is selling for an average of about $3.70 a gallon which is about half of what it is selling for in the Netherlands and Belgium. Later in the trip, we would come to find out that gasoline is about a dollar and a half a gallon more expensive in The Netherlands than it is in Belgium. As I mentioned in my introduction gasoline is quite a bit more expensive in Europe, than it is in the United States. Yes, Europeans get other benefits paid for because of their higher gasoline prices, but as an American touring Europe, I pay the higher prices with no such benefits. This wraps up part one of my two-part series of “Randy and Carol go to the Netherlands and Belgium in search of fun”. When you see my next message, it is going to cover Amsterdam and castle touring and canal boat riding and European Champion Leagues Football and more racing from Belgium…and even more stuff than I can’t even think of right now.
