Chris Halverson’s Blog

Thursday, June 17, 2004

Thursday of our trip found my wife and I waking up at 5AM in order to get to the airport by 6. My wife’s flight was at 8AM and mine was at 9:30. What’s that you say? “You’re on separate flights?” Yes, we were on different flights because we were going to different destinations. My wife was going home (MSP) and I was going to Indianapolis (via DET). I take our bags down to the garage along with a wet towel. Why the wet towel? Well, I forgot to mention this in the Montreal update, but I scratched up our car in the parking ramp. We got a brand new (less than 50Km) Monte Carlo (a free upgrade). Ironically, a bigger car was not a good thing. The parking ramp was so tight that it took a six point turn just to get it into the spot. Anyway, I scraped the wall one time and got a bunch of yellow paint on the bumper. I got most of it off, but when we went to return it they weren’t open yet, so I don’t know if they dinged me or not.

Montreal Dorval airport is a nice looking and well managed airport. Very nice as far as airports go. We make our way through customs and hang out for a bit. Our gates are right next to each other so we hang out together for a bit until my wife is called to board. I go and grab another coffee spending the last of my Canadian money and go back and wait. I finally get called to board and I am notice that my wife’s plane has not rolled off yet. Hmm…My plane gets full and they close the door, then announce that there’s some computer problem that our flight, and the flight to MSP (ie. my wife’s) needed to fix before we left. Ironically that meant that my wife and I left at about the same time, the bad part was she had to sit on the plane for an hour.

Ninety minutes later finds me in beautiful (as far as airports go) Detroit International airport. I’m early, so I grab a quick lunch at Chili’s and enjoy an uneventful flight to IND. While waiting for my bag to come through, I process my car reservation and am ready to go. I then confirm that my hotel is indeed a good half hour away from the track. Joy.

By some freak of nature I find my hotel on the first try. It helps that it’s literally in the middle of an empty field. Come to find out that they have free wireless Internet. YES! Thursday has nothing going on at the track, so I decided to just hang out in my room for a while after running to get diet Coke and 24 500ml bottles of water to bring to the track (I try to avoid paying $2 a bottle when I can buy 24 for $3.50 and bring it with me).

After dinner I decide to try to hit the local “Martini and Cigar” bar that the hotel manager told me about. I was kind of excited, envisioning a dark, elegant looking, smoke filled bar. Instead, I found a bar sandwiched between a grocery store and a pet store. The eight people in the bar looked like they went there every night. Not the old booze hounds, but young people who went there to socialize. Needless to say, I was the odd person out. I got myself a nice long pour of Dewar’s scotch (neat) for $3.50. Normally I’d get something better, but I don’t think they would have had anything better. I then start to look around for the cigars only to find a big display case (note, not a humidor) with about 6 boxes of cigars, with a total of about 15 cigars among all of them. Hmm..guess I won’t have one. I make a mental note to find a tobacco store on Friday. I have my drink and head back to the hotel thinking Friday night’s karaoke may be more lively.

Friday, June 18, 2004

I get up early to hit the track by 10AM in order to scope out a seat and get a feel for the track. After a nice breakfast at the hotel I make the journey to the track, find somebody’s yard to park on and head into the track.

I didn’t have a ticket yet for the race, but everybody said it’s easy to get them from scalpers on the street. Scalping is leagal in Indy, so it’s no problem. I had done some research on what grandstands to get a ticket for and head directly to Stand J and head up high. This gives a great view of the front straight and turn one. While there I met a guy who had an extra ticket for the North grandstand. We head over to check it out and it looks like a good seat, so I buy it off of him. I probably overpaid for it, but I paid less than face and after all that I had spent in the previous week, $20 or so was really no big deal

After watching the first free practice in the blazing sun (it was 85F with about 70% or so humidity) I decided to go and watch the second practice from the paddock area along the front stretch. These seats would suck during the race (of course, they were the most expensive), but they were covered and offered a good view of the pits. I watched the practice (Forza Rubens!) and headed back to the car. Along the way I see a vendor along the street is a tobacco store from downtown and has a ton of cigars. Sweet. I asked for a recommendation and ended up getting a couple Arturo Fuente 8-5-8 (or something) for later.

A quick dinner and some down time at the hotel until about 10pm when I head to the bar again. Keep in mind, I don’t want to get drunk or anything. My goal was to get out of the hotel for a bit, hopefully see some other race fans and just hang out a bit. Even though my hotel was full of race goers, they either all stayed in or went to a different bar as it was basically the same crowd as the night before, just more of them. There were probably 30 people in the bar when I got there. I sat down at the bar and waited to get served. And waited. And waited. I waited at least 10 minutes before I got served by the one waitress who had to man the whole place, the bar and the floor, by herself. Of course, the regulars were just calling out her name and holding up their empty glass/bottle and she’d get them a new one. I, on the other hand, had to wait forever. When she finally gets to me I give her my order, “Scotch, neat”. She brings me back scotch on the rocks. I’m already pissed about waiting so long so I make her bring me the right drink. I have a sip, start to get relaxed and light up a cigar. I’m kicking back and am watching one person do karaoke. About every third song the guy running it would yell out, “Fred, here’s another one” and Fred would saunter up, sing one song, then sit back down. This went on for the better part of an hour. This one guy was the only person who would get up and sing and only after he got called up. Fun. I enjoyed the cigar and hadn’t seen the waitress on my end of the bar again so I left. I then made a mental note to not bother coming back on Saturday.

Saturday, June 19, 2004

I wasn’t feeling too well on Saturday. I don’t do well in the heat and I think it hit me pretty hard. I slept in until 9AM. This caused problems as the the schedule for the day had two practice sessions, the second would end at 10AM or so. There’s no way I could get ready and get down there by then. The qualifying format has each car run two laps. I decided that it wasn’t worth a 30 minute drive, $20 for parking and $20 for the day ticket to watch two laps per driver. I hung out at the hotel and finished up my school paper while watching qualifying on TV. I watched some TV that night and caught up on poker blogs, 2+2, etc. No poker though.

Sunday, June 20, 2004

Race Day!!

I get up at 8, had breakfast and got to the track by 9:30 or so. Perfect. I beat a lot of traffic and have a couple hours to chill. I grab a spot of shade and pull out my book and read for an hour or so. About an hour before the race I decide to get my son new new Ferrari shirt and fight my way through the horde to get a shirt and start to look for something to eat.

I finally make it up to my seat in time for the national anthem (15 mins prior to start). This gives me time to finish eating, get my camera ready and get my scanner going. Finally it’s race time!

You can read race reports somewhere else, but suffice it to say that Ralf Schumacher’s crash was scary. The whole crowd was silent as we waited to hear what happened. As they slowly drove the ambulance around the track, a roar of applause followed it, everybody thankful that he was OK. In the end, the race ended up how I wanted it to, ie. Michael Schumacher won!

I’m going to call Ferrari and tell them that they need to send me to every Grand Prix. I’ve been to three of them now and not only has Schumacher won each one, but Juan Pablo Montoya has not got any points at any of them. Therefore, I obviously bring good vibes to the race that they can harness. Hopefully they’ll go for it…

Indianapolis has got traffic control figured out. Unlike my hours of waiting in Montreal, at the end of the race I was quickly on the freeway. They shut down whole roads and turn them into one ways that only lead to the freeway. You cannot even turn down side roads, they just send everybody to the freeway, and quickly. It was great. Within an hour of the end of the race I was at my gate at the airport. The gate, not the building, but the gate. I wish I would have known this ahead of time as there was a 4:15 flight to MSP. It was now 3:05. My flight left at 6:30. Oh boy, a nice long wait, at least there will be somewhere decent to get a bite to eat, right?

Wrong.

The Indianapolis International Airport sucks. Badly. Unlike most airports, once you go down your concourse you’re stuck there with whatever “restaurants” are there. I wish I would have known this before going through security because there was nothing but a Subway and a sports bar in my concourse. The sports bar was overflowing with people watching the US Open and drowning their sorrows about there not being another bar to go to. The decor sucks too, it’s just a depressing airport. Ug.

My flight is finally called and, as usual, is mega-packed. Thankfully it’s a short (75 minute) flight. I get off and call Mrs. H to come and get me while I head down to baggage claim. There was only about four bags from my flight. Evidently everybody else was going on the continuing flight to Pheonix. Very uneventful flight and I was glad to be in a modern airport, even for a little bit.

I get home and decide to relax a bit by watching a bit of TV. Before I left, I carefully scheduled a bunch of stuff to be recorded on my Tivo so that I wouldn’t miss anything (The Shield season finale, Late Night Poker, WPT, the F1 races and such). I turn on the TV and am greeted by the Tivo screen saying that it cannot show live TV. I have hacked my Series 1 Tivo to include a 2nd hard drive and an ethernet card, so sometimes it gets kinda funky. I note that it’s trying to record the US Grand Prix but notice it’s playing again at midnight so I reset the recorder. Same problem. WTF? I also notice that Tivo hasn’t recorded anything for a week. A week?!?! NO! It did get the Canadian Grand Prix though, and I still had a chance to get the US one if I could figure out what was wrong. I’m swearing, hitting buttons on my receiver, swearing some more, turning things off and on, everything. Finally, I get up off my ass and check the connections. The freaking cable from the cable box to the Tivo is disconnected. How did that happen? Once reconnected everything suddenly worked. *whew*

Going to a race is very much like going to any live sporting event; basically you get spoiled by watching it at home due to the commentary. I really wanted to watch the races that I went to so that I could get the full commentary and get better views of what was happening. I rescheduled the USGP to be recorded and settled in to watch the Canadian GP, still fuming that a bunch of stuff hadn’t recorded. A glass of real Scotch (Oban) cleared that up nicely though. I asked my son if he had messed around with the Tivo during the week and why he hadn’t mentioned it when I called. He said he pulled it out once to pull the power (some of the extra software I installed on my Tivo causes it to lock up). Oh well, such is life.

Overall, the Indy trip was great. The race was awesome. The hotel (Holiday Inn Express), while out in the sticks, was very good. The bar sucked, but that’s not Indy’s fault. Downtown is the hoppin’ place to be, but was either totally sold out or $250+ a night. The traffic management out of the track is unbelievable and makes the whole experience feel very smooth, especially compared to Montreal. Indy is very much in the South though. Lots of people calling on the radio saying they don’t understand F1 and why don’t they race on the oval like NASCAR. Geez, expand your boundries a little bit, OK? Thankfully, while the announcers had a definite IRL bias (ug), they at least tried to pump up F1.

If you plan on going to a F1 race, Indianapolis is a good one to go to. It doesn’t have quite the flair of a European one, but you don’t have to fight traffic and they know how to run a race. Highly recommended. Get seats in Stand J, Northwest Vista or North Vista, get them high up (rows with double letters) and you can’t go too wrong.

Wow, this ran long, thanks for hanging in there.

AlCantHang asked me: If you had to chose just one, watching F1 racing or playing poker?

I tried to respond in his comments, but I evidently got long winded as I hit the limit of his comment box thing. Here’s my response.

F1 or Poker…Well, I’d have to say poker for a couple of reasons. Let’s start out by saying that I love F1, but I’ll never be able to actually “do” it. Watching it and going to experience a race is an incredible event though. My grandstands in Montreal literally shook when the cars went by. Nothing like 20 cars, pushing 900 bhp running at 19,000 RPM, go blowing by. I love the technology and the spectacle that is F1. If I had to choose to watch any one kind of racing, it would most likely be F1.

That said, poker is something to “do”. I can go to the casino if I want to be sociable. Of course, I’m a huge introvert, so that’s not usually the reason I go anywhere I met a couple people at the F1 race, but nobody I will keep in touch with. On the other hand, I’ve “met” (and in hdouble’s case, physically met) many great people via online poker. I routinely IM with some, email others, chat at the table, etc. with them. It’s something I can look forward to. I can go online and look for people, go to their table, and sweat them (and vice versa) and other such fun. It’s a great “community”. Granted, there are F1 communities, but they all revolve around the dealings of other people (the drivers and teams). Poker revolves around your own and other people’s actions. It’s much more personal.

Poker also gives me the chance to learn. I love to learn new things (hence part of my reasoning to get my master’s degree) and poker can definitely cause you to think and if you put in the time you can learn new things.

Lastly, let’s not forget about the money aspect. I’m not to the point where I’m making any real money at poker, but I do know that I spent over $300 for tickets to the Canada race alone, not to mention air fare, hotel, car, etc. I soon hope I get to the point where I’m actually making some “real” money at poker. I’m not planning on living off it or anything, but “real” money at a level of 3/6 or something where winning 5BB means something compared to 50/1. Once again, I’m not turning pro and I have no notion that I’m a great player by any stretch, but I feel I’m better than the average player (or soon will be) and can leverage that to earn a little extra.

I just hope I never have to make the choice though

I had spent the first couple of days in Montreal with my wife sightseeing and such. On Sunday I got up bright and early to go to the Grand Prix. I donned my Ferrari shirt and cap, went down for a big breakfast and headed for the subway. I had bought tickets the day before so I could avoid any lines. Of course I did not ask about the schedule, so I ended up waiting in the station for 20 minutes before the subway came. Earlier in the morning somebody had decided to commit suicide by jumping in front of a train. While waiting for my train they drove the “suicide” train through the station. Kind of morbid, you could see blood on the front and the window was cracked. I make it to the transfer station and join about 10,000 other people jumping on the train to the island.

Once there it’s a short 20 minute walk to my grandstand. Along the way I watch as some guy is climbing the outside of the biodome. The cops are all over the place trying to figure out a way to get him down. I make it over to see where my grandstand is and since I’m 90 minutes early I stake out a place on the ground in the shade to relax for a bit. I read through my program, listen to my audio book and just try to stay cool for a bit.

Fifteen minutes before the start I make it up to my seat and am loving the view. I’m very close to the top in Grandstand 34, inside the hairpin. To top it off, I’m on the end of the row along the stairs. I start talking with the couple next to me for a bit before the race starts. I get out the camera and get ready to start taking pictures. I also get out my scanner and get ready to listen to ITV’s broadcast and potentially some driver communications.

The weather was beautiful. It was about 75F and sunny, the track was in great shape and the place was packed. It was the second highest attended race at 117,000. Ironically, the highest attended one was when I went in 2002 at 120,000.

The race was great, at least from my point of view. Ferrari and Michael Schumacher won, which is what I wanted. There was some good overtaking at the hairpin as well as Massa’s scary straight on crash into the wall. Thankfully the safety crew got there almost immediately and he was fine. Even better was that Williams got disqualified in the end Actually, I wasn’t happy about that, I like Montoya and want to see him be able to compete.

At the end of the race I decided to brave the Metro for my ride back. In 2002 I went to the Metro station, saw the huge crowd, and decided I could find a better way back. Needless to say, I didn’t. I found a bridge the appeared to go straight into downtown. Uhh…no. About halfway over it takes a sharp turn and goes on for another eternity. At that time I had run out of water and the weather was much hotter. It felt like a death march. Some of you know what bridge I’m talking about, it was crazy.

Anyway, I queue up in the line for the metro (after my 20 minute walk to get there). For the next hour I move forward at the rate of about 1 step every 5 minutes. It literally took me an hour to go the about 100 yards to get to the station. Once inside the station I got turned around and got on the wrong train. I went to the end of the line and had to buy another ticket to go back (just one stop). Doh! I was pissed at first, but in the end it actually probably saved me a ton of time as the line to get on the correct train was huge. The extra $2 was worth it. The ride back was crowded, but uneventful.

All in all, the race was great. I still think they need to find a better way to get the people off the island. It’s just crazy and takes forever. This is very much in contrast to Indianapolis (see USGP Trip Report).

Montreal as a whole is a great city. We stayed closer to downtown (near Rue St. Catherine, about 4 blocks or so from Crescent St.) which provided us the opportunity to walk to many places. This is very different than what we are used to in suburban Minneapolis/St. Paul. It was fun though, it’s just too bad that we did not figure out where everything was until about 3 days into the trip.

We had a wonderful sushi dinner at Sato. I’ve never really had sushi before and it was wonderful. Service was great and so was the food. Highly recommended.

The big dinner was a Queue de Cheval. We had gone here last time and could not wait to get back. The service was incredible as was the food. The servings are huge and the food is delicious. We couldn’t finish it all, but we brought it along as we were staying at a Residence Inn and had a full kitchen in our “apartment”. Of course, we went to the bar after dinner and when we got back (after a couple of drinks) I accidently left the food in the car overnight. Doh! Highest recommendation to go to Queue de Cheval.

We went to the botanical gardens on our second to last day and enjoyed a great day there. Weather was beautiful again and it was very relaxing. All in all we had a great, relaxing vacation. Montreal is a great city.

General Montreal pics

2004 Grand Prix of Canada pics

Next up: Indy!

I’ve put the pictures from my recent vacation up on my site:

Montreal Pics

Formula 1 Canadian Grand Prix

Formula 1 United States Grand Prix

I haven’t added captions yet, those will be forthcoming, at least for the racing ones.

The Montreal pics are basically from the botanical gardens.

Some of the racing pics are a little blurry, but I put them up for my enjoyment not anybody else’s, so it doesn’t bother me too much. This was my first “all digital” vacation. I borrowed my friend’s Canon Digital Rebel and used that exclusively. I ran into some issues with my zoom lens due to the magnification factor of the CCD with respect to the lens. There’s a 1.6x magnification factor if you don’t use a lens that’s created for the camera. It can use the standard Canon EF (?) lenses though, but there is the magnification factor that comes into play. It took a while to get used to that and even with it I still had some issues due to my seating.

Anyway, enjoy! Or not. Whatever

For all you Big Lebowski fans, hurry up and book a trip to Louisville, KY as this weekend there is Lebowski Fest 2004. Sounds like fun!

Went to the “Martini and Cigar” bar tonight. The downside is that it’s a big time local bar, lots of young regulars. All drinking beer. No cigars were being smoked. I checked out their selection (in a big glass case, not a humidor, but a display case) and they had a bunch of empty boxes and about 5 cigars. Now I’m definitely no expert, in fact I just know that I like a cigar, but not even what kind (hints anyone?), but come on, at least have a couple. The upside? My tall pour of scotch was only $3.50. It was a huge pour, and I didn’t order it that way, and it was house scotch (which probably means Johnnie Walker Red or worse), but hell, for $3.50 I’ll take it. Tomorrow night is Karaoke night, so, since I have nothing better to do in a strange town, I’ll try to grab a cigar somewhere else (they’re better than the Marlboro Lights I smoke “normally”) and head on down for a couple long, cheap pours of scotch while watching the locals make fools of themselves.

Of to watch F1 practice in the AM. Penguin, I’ll try to get a pic of a McLaren blowing up. Of course, I’ll have amble opportunity to do that… Looks hot, should be a blast though. I’ve got lots of water and my scanner and camera packed. This is racing nirvana.