The storm clouds rolled in overnight and it was bucketing down for the first couple of hours of our drive this morning. My photo of the Welcome to Indiana sign is very waterlogged!
Fortunately we did manage to get ahead of the clouds and when we arrived in Indianapolis it was overcast but dry. They call themselves the Racing Capital of the World here, and there are signs everywhere saying so, just in case you’ve lived under a rock all your life and have never heard of the Indianapolis 500.
The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum is located inside the racetrack, so we had to drive through a tunnel under the track to reach it. As we’ve found in all the museums we’ve visited this trip we were welcomed at the door with much excitement and interest when we confessed we’d come “All the way from Australia!” . We signed up to do the “Kiss the Bricks” tour which gave us access to the Museum and also a lap of the track in their tour bus with a stop for photos at the famous finish line.
The museum is extensive, wth specials displays of winning cars dating back to the earliest days of the race. In one area they had the 1911 winning car and the 2011 winning car and you could watch a little video of each race, things certainly changed a lot in 100 years!
1911 winner at left, 2011 at right
There were Indy Cars and Nascars as well as one older style Drag racing car with some really magnificent trophies too.
At 12.30 we hopped on the bus for our tour. The track really is huge, 2 1/2 miles around and we rode along on the upper edge of the track which is banked at around 12 degrees at the turns..
At the finish line we hopped out and lined up to “Kiss the Bricks”. In the early days the racetrack was surfaced with 3.2 million paving bricks, which must have made for a very bumpy ride and gave the track it’s nickname, “The Brickyard”. In 1938, the entire track was paved with asphalt except fora small portion of the front straight and then in 1961, the remaining bricks were covered with asphalt except for a yard-wide strip of the original bricks which were kept intact at the start/finish line. This is fabled ground for Indy Car fans and is known as the Yard of Bricks.
Neil at the Yard of Bricks
In 1996 a new tradition was started by a race winner who knelt down and kissed the yard of bricks, and every winner has repeated it since. So of course when we arrived at the finish line we were all invited to kneel down and Kiss the Bricks. We even have a badge to prove that we’ve done it! I’m not sure if it endows us with any special powers, like kissing the Blarney stone but in Indianapolis, it’s “What you Do!”
Between the racetrack and the hotel we passed by the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. Judging by the dinosaurs fighting to get inside the building it must have some pretty cool displays inside.
Were checked in tonight at the Hilton garden Inn Downtown and I’d planned for us to take a walk to the State Capitol Building and to admire some of the grand Victorian skyscrapers that are still in use but we didn’t get any further than Monument Circle before the rain finally caught up with us. The circle is a grand street, paved in bricks with a spectacular war memorial statue in it’s centre.
Monumemt Circle, Downtown Indianapolis
As we’d left our raincoats in the car, which had been whisked away by the Valet parking boys we decided to beat a retreat to the hotel. Hopefully we’ll see a little more of the city before we have to leae in the morning.