Greetings from Carlyle, Illinois
From the travels and adventures of the
“World’s #1 Trackchaser”
Carlyle County Fairgrounds – Carlyle, Illinois
Lifetime Track #1,984
Just having fun in the midwest. I woke up this morning at home in Joliet, Illinois. I went to bed in Fenton, Missouri, Illinois. Today was the ninth day of my 42-day mega trackchasing trip. Today started with some rental car management. I would need to return my car to Chicago’s O’Hare airport. I needed to close out my rental car contract at O’Hare. I would then re-rent the same car I was driving for a one-way rental contract to St. Louis. Once in St. Louis I will close on the contract on the one-way rental and re-rent the same car I’m driving! This allows me the luxury of not having to unpack the entire car and put all my stuff in a new car for a new rental car contract. I’ll have the car for several days in St. Louis before flying off to Denver. Don’t understand this strategy. Don’t worry. Often when you don’t know the “whys and wherefores” of someone’s behavior it’s about the money. Toll happy. The greater Chicagoland area is one of the most toll happy places I have ever seen. That being the case I used my iPhone and Google maps which recommended toll-free routes. The 40-mile non-toll trip up to O’Hare this morning took 10 minutes longer but was 1 mile shorter than the route where no tolls were charged. This strategy probably saved the better part of a $10 bill at the expense of 10 more minutes of travel time. Happy birthday Louis! All during my drive I was busy texting my friends and relatives as well as wishing Louis Skypala a happy 70th birthday. He’s traveling in Europe now. Louis keeps up with my trackchasing emails. Louis tells me he is most interested in my foreign trackchasing activities. Gas prices are high in Chicago. Indiana gas was about $3.35 per gallon. The first gas station in Chicago at a freeway exit was charging $3.89. I drove on a couple of miles more on surface streets. I soon found a gas station selling unleaded gas for $3.65 per gallon. We have the same situation and San Clemente. The station located just off the freeway sells gas for about $.30 more per gallon than another station located less than 1 mile away but in town. Lesson learned. There are certainly lots of ways to cut financial corners without having to decrease the quality of the experience or the product. East Peoria, Illinois….my boyhood hometown. I won’t eat anything today until 3 p.m. Why? I making a slight detour to my hometown of East Peoria Illinois. I will order a Davis Bros. pizza when I’m just 20 minutes from East Peoria. Then I will swoop in off I-74 to pick up pizza. I’ll enjoy the piping hot pizza on my way down to the Clinton County Fair. How many people have their favorite pizza place located nearly 2,000 miles from their home AND get to go there 2-3 times every year? I’m very luck in that regard. It wasn’t long before I was picking up my pizza. I grew up in East Peoria, Illinois. East Peoria is located just across the Illinois River from the bigger metropolitan area of Peoria. These are factory towns. The Caterpillar Tractor Company has its world headquarters in Peoria, Illinois. I worked at “CAT” for three summers while going to college. My income from there and various jobs in college (including being a dormitory resident assistant) completely paid for my college. I paid for 100% of my college expenses and graduated with zero debt. Above you will see where I worked 40 hours a week ($1.80/hour) for three summers at the East Peoria Sanitary district. What was my job? I cut weeds along the river bank with a scythe! Try that every day during the hot and humid Illinois summers. My all-time favorite pizza. The greater Peoria area has not done well economically for the past 30 years. Most of the area’s Caterpillar Tractor industrial plants have closed. Nevertheless Davis Bros. Pizza still gets $19.71 before tip for a 14-inch pizza. That seems pretty expensive to me. However I’m willing to bear the cost for two reasons. First stock market has done very well over the past several years. Unfortunately for most Americans 80% of the stock is owned by 10% of the people. That means 10% of people are doing very very well. The other 80%….not so much. Secondly I’ve been going to Davis Bros. for going on 50 years. It’s part of my DNA. The roads in Michigan and Illinois are an absolute mess. They will never catch up on highway maintenance here. If they hadn’t spent so much money on orange barrels in the construction zones they would probably have more than enough money to have decent highways. Lucked out again. I got my last speeding ticket back into thousand three entering a small town in Minnesota at midnight. The small town speed limit was 30 mph. I didn’t get slowed down quick enough. Today I came very close to getting another speeding ticket in a similar situation. Today’s driving would take me through rural Illinois. I was exiting a small town and probably accelerated just a little too quickly from 30 to 40 M.P.H. I did this just before the speed limit increased to that amount. Just at that moment a police car was passing me in the opposite direction. I looked in my rearview mirror and saw the “copper” make a U-turn. I’ve seen that happen a few times before. For speeders like me that’s a very bad sign. The Davis Bros. pizza in the bottom of my stomach sank. I have had nine speeding tickets since I started driving in 1965 but none since 2003. It was only a matter of moments before the telltale flashing lights would appear and I would be having another encounter with a law-enforcement officer. However I have been trained not to give up until the checkered flag falls. I minded my peas and cues and drove just 55 miles an hour down the rural two-lane highway. The police officer followed. I was worried. The more he followed the more I worried. He followed me for approximately 10 miles. During this time I had plenty of time to rehearse what I was going to say. I could argue that the statute of limitations had run out since he followed me for more than 10 miles. I could tell him in broken Spanish (the only kind of Spanish I speak) that I didn’t speak English or read signs in English. However I decided to go with this story. I would start off by asking the officer a question. If I could tell him a story that he had never heard before about why I was speeding would he let me go? What was going to be my story? It was simple. It was brief. I would tell the officer “A few years ago my wife ran away with a state trooper. I thought you were bringing her back.” The police officer just kept following me. Why had he made a U-turn when I was speeding, tailed me for ten miles and NOT pulled me over. Was he waiting on “back up”? I thought maybe he was waiting until we drove into his hometown to pull me over. Maybe he was leading me to the county seat just to make the paperwork of the job easier. When we came to a four-way stop out of the middle of nowhere I went left and he went right. Maybe he decided not to stop me so he could make it home to supper quicker. I didn’t know for sure. I didn’t really care. My blood pressure was now returning to normal. I wasn’t sure if my story about my wife running away with a state trooper was going to work. However someday I will have to use that story. When I do you’ll be the first to hear whether it worked or not. Tonight’s racing would take place in Carlyle, Illinois. I have seen, on average 35-40 racetracks per state. If you randomly placed 35- 40 dots on a state map you would probably conclude there’s very little geography that I have not covered within the U.S. multiple times. However today’s visit took me to the southern half of my boyhood stay in Illinois. Oddly this was only 100 miles or so from where I grew up. However, when we did travel during my childhood, which wasn’t often, we always went north or west and never south when making trips out of our base of East Peoria, Illinois. I would say this part of Illinois is one of the most lightly traveled areas within the United States for me. As much as I’ve traveled I amazed by this set of circumstances. I always try to strike up a conversation with the people seated near me. Tonight I met a young man who was obviously mentally challenged to some degree. He even described his situation as being mentally challenged. My new friend told me that during his junior year in high school he was tracking at a third grade level. He mentioned that he had dropped out of high school. He also suggested he might go back to get his GED. Currently, he was collecting a disability check and helping his grandmother. This young man had an uncanny grasp of both geography and baseball. I enjoyed talking with him. The Racing. Clinton County Fairgrounds – Carlyle, Illinois How many county fairs can I possibly go too? All of them? Tonight’s Crawford County fair was on the smaller side. It cost three dollars to park. There was a $10 charge for admission to the race arena, three dollars for a corndog and five dollars for a lemon shakeup. I had called in advance to confirm they were racing tonight. I asked how many cars were expected to show up. The woman on the other end of the line gave her best guesstimate of 20 cars. I have learned to divide these guesstimates in half or more. Tonight is a small car division there were three cars. In the large car division there were eight cars. I never think promoters are lying to me when they describe their expected car counts. They’re just being “professionally optimistic”. Following a lemonade and corn dog supper it was time for racing. During tonight’s races one driver in each division was disqualified for considering this to be a demolition derby rather than autocross event. At intermission they had two classes divided by age group of kids riding their power wheels in a demolition derby event. These types of events with kids are becoming more and more popular. I think they are simply using this activity to fill the show and drag things out. Tonight’s small car feature event of two cars for 20 laps was a bit much. Remember one driver was disqualified earlier for rough driving. The 7-car big car 20-lap feature was as good as it could be on a flat dirt oval temporary track. Remember a 7-car feature always looks better when it follows a 2-car feature! A small crowd of 150 people watched. I suspect in this farming community $10 for this type of entertainment is expensive. I was told tomorrow night’s tractor pull at the fair, a much more popular activity in Southern Illinois, carried a $20 admission price. After the races…….. I have now been on the road for nine days on this 42-day trip. During that period I have added 10 tracks to my lifetime trackchasing resume. The weather has been on the coolish side. Tonight at 10 PM when the checkered flag flew it was 64°. That’s cool in Illinois in the summertime. The weather forecast for the next several days looks to be dry and not too hot. That will be perfect if things stay that way. I would stay the evening at a Priceline.com generated Fairfield Inn in the greater St. Louis area. The best normal internet rate for the hotel was $109. Seniors could get the room for $93, AAA members for 98 and government and military workers $88. What did I pay from Priceline? Just “fitty” (50) dollars! Illinois The Illini state Tonight I saw my 89th lifetime track in the Illini state, yes the Illini state. That puts me just ten Illinois tracks behind Ed Esser the leading trackchaser in my home state. Thanks for reading about my trackchasing, Randy Lewis World’s #1 Trackchaser Peoria Old Timers Racing Club (P.O.R.C.) Hall of Fame Member Illinois sayings: XX QUICK FACTS AIRPLANE Los Angeles, CA (LAX) – Chicago, IL (ORD) – XXX miles RENTAL CAR #1 O’Hare (Chicago) International Airport – trip begins Charlotte, MI Cortland, OH Davisburg, MI Davisburg, MI Mechanicsburg, IL Harlan, IA Primghar, IA Knoxville, IA Bucyrus, OH O’Hare (Chicago) International Airport – trip ends – 3,616 miles RENTAL CAR #2 O’Hare International Airport – trip begins Carlyle, IL TRACK ADMISSION PRICES: Eaton County Fairgrounds – $10 Trumbull County Fairgrounds – $4 Oakland County Fairgrounds – oval – $10 ($10 to park!) Oakland County Fairgrounds – figure 8 – $10 ($10 to park….again!) Ealyville Speedway – Complimentary pit pass Shelby County Speedway – $5 Primghar Raceway – $5 Knoxville Raceway – No charge – Ticket given to me by race sponsor Crawford County Fairgrounds – $10 Clinton County Fair – $10 ($3 parking) LIFETIME TRACKCHASER COMPARISONS The three most important trackchasing comparisons to me are: Total lifetime tracks seen Total “trackchasing countries” seen Lifetime National Geographic Diversity results Total Lifetime Tracks There are no trackchasers currently within 400 tracks of my lifetime total. Don’t blame me. Total Trackchasing Countries There are no trackchasers currently within 10 countries of my lifetime total. Current lifetime National Geographic Diversity results That’s all folks! Official end of the RLR – Randy Lewis Racing Trackchaser Report Click here to see my boyhood hometown, my high school, my favorite pizza joint and more…. Touring my boyhood state of Illinois and trackchasing too! 
