Coos Bay Speedway

I took nearly a month off trackchasing during the summer season….that’s unheard of!…………….more in “Special Report”.

This was a long walk for a short slide……………..more in “The Plan”

Wal-Mart provides more than toothpaste…………..details in “The Trip”.

How many times must you sleep in your car before you qualify as being homeless? ………..details in “The Experience”.

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?

Jules, Mitch and Astrid – Age 4!!

That would be a legitimate question to ask.  It HAS been 23 days since my last trackchasing adventure….in Saskatchewan, Canada.  You might not know it but there’s a good deal of pressure in simply being retired and trying to fight off those “Dreaded East Coast Trackchasers” as they try to wrest the “World’s #1 Trackchaser” title from me.

Can you imagine I’ve taken off almost a full month from trackchasing during the summer season?

It is unheard of for a leading trackchaser to voluntarily take off nearly the entire month of June and more from trackchasing.  Nevertheless, that is what I did.  Family responsibilities come first.  What did I do?  Lots of things!

I played golf a couple of times.  My back is now in good shape thanks to my Egoscue training.  However, I don’t have much time for golf nowadays.  If I can play 1-2 times per month that will be fine with me.

Of course, we had the twins’ birthday party, James’ birthday and Father’s Day to celebrate during my 23-day breather.  Then Carol and I flew down to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico with the family for some time in the sun.  We ate good food, went to timeshare presentations and just “hung out” with the family.  The highlight was a dinner cruise for everyone, a reward for going to those timeshare presentations!

We also made a trip back to Illinois for my brother-in-law, Bob’s, retirement party after 45 years with the Caterpillar Tractor Company.  That’s long enough.  Time to do something else.  During our visit we saw all kinds of “Midwest” family.  I snuck away for a round of golf with college fraternity brother Mike Skonicki too.  Of course, during this trackchasing break I worked on my aerobic exercise plan and Carol and I went to Angels’ baseball games.

Several years ago, I established goals for time away from trackchasing.  I’ve found that when I set goals I normally achieve them.  However, a key to setting goals is to announce them before you try to achieve them.  Why do that?  If you simply say “I just made my goal of doing XYZ”. without telling anyone in advance, who’s too say you didn’t fudge on your goal and/or your achievement.  I like to set stretch goals, tell somebody about them so I can be held accountable and then try to meet or exceed my goal.

My goal of taking at least 23 weekends away from trackchasing is designed to allow me to spend more time with friends and family.  The last four weekends were exactly what this goal was all about. However, this goal doesn’t always keep me home.  During this 23-day stint I traveled with Carol overnight away from home for six nights.  During the first six months of this year I’ve traveled overnight away from home for 87 nights and Carol’s total is fifty-six overnights.  Please don’t tell her she’s traveled that much.  If she knew she might not want to travel anymore this year.  We still have some BIG trips planned for 2013.

Entertainment Diversification Update

2013 Goal:  23 full weekends (a full weekend is Friday, Saturday AND Sunday) away from trackchasing.  This goal is in place to keep my free time in perspective.

Current results:  11 weekends off through July 4, 2013

Prognostication:  I fully expect to meet and possibly exceed my goal.

My drive from San Francisco to Coos Bay.

A long walk for a short slide.

Coos Bay, Oregon is 916 miles from San Clemente.  I had already seen 18 tracks in Oregon far more than anyone else I know of.  How could I fit the Coos Bay Speedway into a plan when I didn’t have any other area track to “tie it into”?

First, I chose to visit on a Tuesday night.  This way it wouldn’t count against my “Entertainment Diversification Goal”!  Oregon can be rainy.  I’ve had Coos Bay on my radar in the past only to have the trip foiled by rain.  The weather forecast for the area this week was perfect.

Next up I had to figure out a way to get there efficiently from both a “time and money” point of view.  It’s not worth it to put too much of either into a one-track visit.  By the way, you will rarely be reading about any one-track visits from me.

There are two exceptions to that rule.  I will make that kind of trip for a single track on the west coast where it involves just a single day or night trip.  I will also travel for just one track when we visit foreign countries.  Most of the time it’s impossible to tie in two countries during one weekend.  I’ve done it but I can’t do that most of the time.

The planning process for this trip was particularly challenging.  I had all kinds of restraints from the busy summer air travel season to family commitments at home.  However, if I could sneak the entire trip into a 30-hour time frame that would work perfectly.  More on all of that in the “Trip” section.

This one was not easy to get too.

I woke up this morning in San Clemente, California.  I went to bed in Eugene, Oregon.  This is what today looked like.

The Coos Bay Speedway is located in a remote location along the western coast of Oregon.  I considered flying into three Oregon airports.  None of the three, Portland (3.5 hours driving), Medford (3 hours) or Eugene (2.7 hours) was very close to Coos Bay.

During the summer it is most difficult to fly “standby”.  A one-track trip didn’t justify buying an airplane ticket.  I would need to be creative.  My potential connecting cities from Los Angeles were primarily Denver, Salt Lake City and San Francisco.  I couldn’t risk being stranded in the first two.  If I were there would be no time to drive to the track if I didn’t get on the second plane.

I just want to get there.  I’ll worry about getting home later.

By the way, I only really worry about GETTING to my destination.  I figure I can always get home sooner or later.  However, if I don’t get there I won’t accomplish the primary purpose of the trip, which is SEEING a new track.  Make sense?

Ultimately, my best bet was to take a wide-open flight from LAX to San Francisco.  In San Francisco, my rental car sponsor, National, gave me a nearly free car to drive up to Oregon and ultimately drop-off in Eugene, Oregon.  One-way car rentals are one of my most cost-effective trackchasing options.

My home alarm “rang” at 3:21 a.m.  I had hoped to be backing out of the garage 9 minutes later.  However, it took me 14 minutes to make this happen.  I must be slipping in my old age.  Carol can’t believe I PLAN for just 9 minutes of prep from “wake-up to back-up”.  I’m always telling her the secret is “eliminate, streamline and mechanize”.  Yes, it makes for some interesting dinner conversation.

Once out of my driveway I would spend the next 15 hours getting to the Coos Bay Speedway.  Then I would “sit on a board” for about three hours before going to sleep overnight in my car.  Sounds like a fun vacation huh?

After the races…..

Wal-Mart provides more than toothpaste.

After the races I had a nearly three-hour drive from the speedway to Eugene, Oregon.  I arrived in Eugene at about 1 a.m.  My flight was just five hours later.  That meant I would be sleeping in my car.

Where would be a good place to park my car while I slept in it?  Wal-Mart.  They’re good for just about everything else so why not “camp” at Wal-Mart. 

Wal-Mart allows people with real campers to stay overnight in their parking lot.  They think it increases overall security and they like the business they get from traveling campers.  I feel safe sleeping overnight in a Wal-Mart parking lot.  I’ll only do this when there is five hours or less from the time I arrive until the time I need to leave for the airport.  I’ll tell you more about tonight’s activity in the “Experience” section.

This is always fun but sometimes sleep is put on the back burner.

This short trip provided just the experience I was looking for.  It was an experience that very few people would get.  I had just enough free time to be gone from home for about 30 hours.

This was enough time to fly up to very pretty spot along the Oregon coast.  My home in San Clemente is 917 miles from Coos Bay.  How many people get the chance to spend a few hours at a very picturesque place that far from their home and still not take a lot of time doing it.  I’m very lucky.

To top it off I got to spend three hours enjoying my hobby of watching auto racing.  Sometimes on these trips the racing takes a backseat to the sightseeing.  On this trip I was looking forward to both.

In order to make this trip happen I would need to cover more than 1,800 miles in about thirty hours.  That meant my body was averaging about 60 M.P.H. for the ENTIRE trip.

However, when lots needs to be done in a small amount of time some things need to be “compressed”.  That was the case on this trip as well.  What was compressed?  Sleep….and my sleeping arrangements.

Would you sleep overnight in your car….somewhat routinely?

Folks who have read my Trackchaser Reports over the past few years know that I must sleep overnight in my car on occasion.  My primary motivation in doing that is to get the very most I can from my WAKING hours.  That normally means going to bed late and getting up early.

I had to go to bed late (12:30 a.m.) because I needed to stay for the final feature event at the racetrack and then drive nearly three hours to be near the Eugene (OR) Airport.  I had to get up early (4:00 a.m.) to catch a 5:30 a.m. flight from Eugene to San Francisco.  I needed this early flight in order to get home in time for the beginning of our big Fourth of July (yes, sometimes these reports are delayed a bit but they always appear in the chronological order in which I saw the tracks) family event.

I would have exactly 3 ½ hours for overnight sleep.  Getting a hotel didn’t make sense given these requirements.  I didn’t have a lot of wiggle room with my time constraints.  This meant a “nap” in the car.

What can I learn after all these years?

Folks, I’ve been doing what I do in this hobby for a very long time.  I have averaged over THIRTY track visits in each and every one of our American states.  I’ve seen more than 100 tracks in Canada.  I’ve traveled to 65 countries pursuing my worldwide tracks.

What new travel ideas could I possible learn at this stage?  Hopefully a lot!  If you think you know it all in just about anything you do you’re not likely to learn much more.  People might not take kindly to someone who thinks they have nothing more to learn.

What a great idea!

The other day I was bemoaning the fact that trying to sleep overnight in the driver’s seat of a passenger car was most uncomfortable.  The young woman I was talking too (I honestly can’t remember who it was) offered this, “Why don’t you sleep in the front passengers seat?  That way you won’t have the steering wheel to deal with”.

Duh!!  What a GREAT idea.  I tried it last night in the Wal-Mart parking lot in Eugene, Oregon.  I can’t recall every having a better night’s rest overnight in a passenger car.  What did that prove to me?  It proved, once again, that you can never have enough good ideas.  Where do I get my ideas?  From other people!!

ONE CANNOT LIVE WELL OR SLEEP WELL IF ONE HAS NOT DINED WELL

Rodeo Steak House & Grille – Coos Bay, Oregon

One of the best features of these trips is having the ability to find good restaurants.  At this stage in life I rely on the recommendations of others almost 100%.  That often comes in the form of Yelp!  Of course, for me, Yelp! is a smartphone app that ranks restaurants based upon user reviews.

I can simply plug-in the word “dinner” and the city name of wherever I will be visiting and presto I am given a list of all the primary (usually non-chain) restaurants in town.  I have stumbled across so many great places to eat this way.

For some reason I was craving steak today.  I don’t go to steakhouses all that often.  I really don’t eat that much red meat and steakhouses can be very expensive as well.  Give me a good Italian, Mexican or Chinese restaurant and I will be happy.

Tonight’s location was what I would call a “country” steakhouse even though it was located in downtown Coos Bay.  It was the kind of place you can throw the peanut shells on the floor and I did.  On a scale of 1-5 I would give this place a “3”.  Certainly not the best but O.K.  The waiter tried a little too hard.  For what I was getting the place was a little too expensive.  However, there didn’t seem to be that many alternatives on a non-chain basis.  That’s one of both the pros and cons of American eating.  Chains do what they do so well that customer preference has made chain eating the king despite there still being lots of other opportunities in most places.

COOS BAY SPEEDWAY – COOS BAY, OREGON

Coos Bay Speedway pit area.

A beautiful location with O.K. racing.

I wouldn’t say the racing was great at Coos Bay but it wasn’t bad either.  I guess it was kind of like eating at the Rodeo Steakhouse.  Tonight’s event was part of a weeklong “speed week” at tracks all over Oregon. Of the 6-7 tracks where the ASCS 360 sprint cars would be racing the only track on the schedule that I had not seen was this event at Coos Bay.

The track sits in a beautiful location nestled in a huge forest of evergreens that Oregon is famous for.  Using Google Maps the track was easy to find just off Oregon route 42.  The track offered a 10% senior discount for those that had reached an “unnamed” age.  I figured I qualified under, if nothing else, the special clause of “if you don’t ask you don’t get”.

“Racing” was scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m.  I called the track to see if “racing” really meant racing or just track packing, hot laps or qualifying.  All I got was a recorded message that said, “Racing would begin at 6:30 p.m.”  Not wanting to be late I showed up on time.  The National Anthem began precisely at 6:32 p.m.  Good on them.

The grandstand was huge some 30 rows or so tall and the length of the front stretch.  A nice crowd was on hand even though it filled less than half of the available seating.  The P.A. system was good and two announcers (one traveling with the sprint cars and one local announcer) did an excellent job of keeping the crowd entertained and informed.

Too bad I missed the asphalt track.

The announcer told us they would be racing sprint cars just two times this season.  He also mentioned that “about 6-7 years ago” the track ownership put dirt over the existing asphalt racing surface.  I’ve been trying to get up here for longer than that.  Had I been successful I would have been returning tonight to count Coos Bay a second time with the more than liberal rules that allow trackchasers to count a track twice with a change in surface type.

The announcer also told the crowd we were seeing a record amount of sprint cars tonight.  I believe the number was twenty-seven.  The sprinters raced first, with the lineups based upon a pill draw.  I liked that.  They were using “passing points”.  I liked that.  That setup made the drivers try as hard as they could in the heat races.

Nevertheless, the 6-7 car heats were not very good.  It was mostly follow the leader on the inside groove.  The most exciting aspect of the heat racing was when one driver did a series of “endos” at the start/finish line.  Sprint car racing can be a rough and tumble dangerous sport.

Oh, my.  Yes, oh my.

There were three support divisions racing tonight.  They were various forms of low-dollar racers.  Car counts in these divisions were abysmal at 5-6-4.  I was minorly dismayed to learn their heat races would be ten laps long.  That’s a lot of laps for races with so few cars.

The program moved along nicely though.  I had almost recovered from the heartburn of ten lap heat races for these meaningless support divisions when I heard this comment on my race scanner.  “It’s really a slap in the face (to the crowd) to run four cars in a race”.  The other person who responded agreed but confirmed that it must be done.

What could top long heat races for a four-car field?  An even longer lap count for the features!  In one of the more bizarre things I will likely see this year the feature distance for the five and six-car divisions was 25 laps.  Oh, my.  In the five-car field (which was actually TWO classes combined!!!) the winner lapped the field twice.  To show that the race organizers were not total masochists (but almost) the four-car division feature distance was “only” twenty laps.  Despite these decisions the races ran almost “yellow free” and didn’t take all that long.  I guess the track had to reward the competitors who showed up.

The feature was a keeper.

The 20-car sprint car feature ran for 30 laps.  There wasn’t much passing until the last five laps.  On a re-start the driver who had run second all during the race challenged for the lead.  Just when he had the pass almost made the lead driver slammed the door going into turn one.  This caused the second place driver to do a 360-degree spin.  This created a huge pile-up behind him whilc the spinning driver kept his car moving.  Under the rules the spinning driver “got his spot back because he didn’t stop” and restarted in second place.  Veteran race fans know what all this lingo means.  Non-race fans don’t but they will still be able to enjoy their day today.

The racing was all wrapped up by 9:30 p.m.  For a mid-week show this was great.  I was one of the first people out of the parking lot.  I thought I saw a fellow competitor but wasn’t sure.  They all look the same to me.  From the track’s parking lot it was a 2-½ hour drive up to Eugene, my overnight location.

STATE COMPARISONS

Oregon

The Beaver State

This evening I saw my 19th lifetime track in the Beaver state, yes the Beaver state.  I had two remaining tracks to see in Oregon.

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

Oregon sayings:  As pretty as California but not as weird.

AIRPLANE

Los Angeles, CA (LAX) – San Francisco, CA (SFO) – 363 miles

RENTAL CAR #1

San Francisco International Airport – trip begins

Coos Bay, Oregon

Eugene Airport – 679 miles

AIRPLANE

Eugene, OR (EUG) – San Francisco, CA (SFO) – 451 miles

San Francisco, CA (SFO) – Los Angeles, CA (LAX) – 363 miles

Total air miles – 1,177 (3 flights)

Total rental car miles – 679 (1 car)

Total miles traveled on this trip – 1,856 miles 

TRACK ADMISSION PRICES:

Coos Bay International Speedway – $18 ($2 senior discount)

Total racetrack admissions for the trip – $18

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 300 tracks of my lifetime total.  Don’t blame me.

1.  Randy Lewis, San Clemente, California – 1,853

Total Trackchasing Countries

There are no trackchasers currently within 10 countries of my lifetime total. 

1.  Randy Lewis, San Clemente, California – 65

Current lifetime National Geographic Diversity results

1.  Randy Lewis, San Clemente, California – 5.10

That’s all folks!  Official end of the RLR – Randy Lewis Racing Trackchaser Report