Day 9 – Riding The Corkscrew – Anticipation
N36º 34.224' W121º 45.678'
The thoughts passing through my head looked something like the following narrative: “Shit!” Followed by, “Well, I guess I’m screwed. There’s no way I’m going to get my registration and get back to the racetrack in time.” Pause. Longer pause. Resigned look at the bike. More detailed look at the ticket to figure out if there was any loophole, technicality or oversight that might in some way influence my current predicament. Followed by, “Well, if I don’t try, it won’t happen. But damn it, I paid good money for this opportunity, so I might as well try.” Helmet on, bike fired up, I roared out of the parking lot and back towards the hotel.
At 7:40am, I was rolling up the hill towards the hotel. Charging around the last bend, I was rewarded with the sight of… my fuel light coming on. Now, yesterday I got more than 40 miles on my reserve tank. Theory says I could do the same again. But there is no way on this planet that I’m going to go out on a racetrack with a bunch of other riders, in front of stands full of people, and run out of gas. It’s simply not going to happen. Groping through a darkened hotel room, I found my registration. Letting myself out of the room, a slumbering Dianne called out, “Have fun!” Let’s hope, honey, let’s hope.
Next stop, gas. Fortunately, there is a Chevron on the highway on the way back to Monterey. Pulling into the gas station, I put on my happiest of faces and politely negotiated authorizing pump number 5 as I handed over my credit card. Fill up, back to the cashier, wait for woman in front of me to buy out the store’s entire stock of powdered donuts, pay for gas, and hurtle out of the store and back on to the bike. Up Highway 1 as quickly as I can (and let’s be clear, here, I’m on a Ducati — there is some headroom to work with).
When I had picked up the tickets, I was told to get back on the highway, get off at the next exit at Reservation Rd., and follow the race traffic signs. I have also come to realize, however, that the signs on the highway do not always correspond to the name of the road you want to be on, but the locals quite comfortably equate one with the other. Getting off at Canyon Del Ray Rd., for example, involves actually exiting at a sign that says “Del Ray Oaks”. Not dissimilar, but also not the same. And four out of every five signs has the word ‘Del’ somewhere in the name. So as I hurtled northward, I assumed the next exit was in fact the one I wanted. 15 blocks later, however, I had yet to see a sign. Pulling over to consult the (admittedly crude) map, I discovered what looked like a Reservation Rd. exit, just north of the exit for Lightfighter Rd.
Back to the highway and heading back north, past the Lightfighter exit (ignoring the signs saying ‘Race traffic, this exit) because they HAD said the Reservation Rd. exit… and go all the way to the next exit to discover it still isn’t the one I want. After a crisis of self-confidence (not my first of the day, mind) I turn around, blast back down the highway (grateful that this was the exit that the state trooper was doing radar patrol on, and not any one of the several others I’d already gone speeding by in my ride thus far) and take the Lightfighter Rd. exit. From there, I followed the signs for motorcycle traffic. Which pointed me back north, on city streets this time, to exactly the same road I had exited on when I thought I was getting it wrong.
At this point, I’m feeling that a) I can’t win, b) whoever organized this event really didn’t think about how to provide clear directions to people from out of town and c) there is no way that I’m going to get to the racetrack in time. By the time I was following the signs to the track, it was already 8:15. At Watkin’s Gate (the motorcycle entrance) it was nearly 8:20. From there, I had 8 miles on an ancient, unmaintained road that skirted a weapons-testing facility of the U.S. armed forces (replete with prominent signs warning of the many fates that would befall you should you trespass) to get to the back entrance to the track. Tickets checked, I was waved through to finally find myself behind the scenes on the backroads of Laguna Seca.
Interestingly, once you get back stage at Laguna Seca, you can go pretty much anywhere you want, it would appear. There are lots of people in rent-a-cop uniforms directing traffic, but none of them seem particularly concerned with where you want to go, or where you should be going. When you get to an intersection, they wave you through in whatever direction it looks most probabilistic that you were wanting to go in. Or, in some instances, wave you through even if you’re pretty sure that you don’t want to go in that direction. Assuming that the arrow signs were colour-coded with the parking passes (logical, but not necessarily actually correct) I figured I wanted to go left while the rent-a-cop was pretty sure that I should be going straight. Straight I went. Along the track, over the track and through to the behind-the-scenes, go-no-further, you really-need-a-special-pass-to-get-in-here kind of place. Where someone helpfully pointed out that I’d gone much too far, and should have turned left at the intersection where I thought I should have turned left.
And so, for the umpteenth time this morning, I turned around once more in a frantic attempt to try to get where I needed to be before the time I needed to be there. With a desperate feeling that this was a terribly lost cause, and one that I should abandon before I took any of it too personally. This, of course, was in itself about an hour too late at this point. If I was going to try, I was going to keep trying until someone said it couldn’t happen. This may in fact be minutes away.