Italian Grand Prix

  Yesterday we left Basel bright and early (very) for Monza, Italy to see the Italian Grand Prix.  It's pretty unlikely we'll ever be able to afford the Monaco race which is on our anniversary and something we've wanted to do ever since we found that out; so this is probably our only opportunity to see one of these.  I tried to get some good pictures but on this track formula 1 cars clocked a top speed of 210.7 MPH and completed the 3.6 mile track in comfortably less than 1 minute 30 seconds.

 The park (Royal Villa of Monza) that the track is next to is pretty big (2.7 square miles) and traffic, parking, signage, and the like were all handled with typical Italian efficiency.  So after we spent about 45 minutes or so sitting still in a line of several hundred cars we eventually found an actual parking spot (while the Italians simply parked on the sidewalk, grass, and in the road in some cases Lauren wouldn't let me do that).  We also found that even though the Police don't speak English the guys making minimum wage selling parking stubs spoke terrific English.  Thanks to them we were able to find the bus (1/4 mile walk) which took us to the park about 1/2 mile from the entrance to the track.  Obviously it's Italy so nothing is normal, so after going through 2 ticket checkpoints where they didn't bother to check our bags we were able to head from the entrance another 1/2 mile or so to the actual track.  Eventually we ran across some Australians who cheered us up quite a bit (as Australians usually do) and made us feel a lot better about our choices in getting to Monza since they took the train and had to walk nearly 3 miles to get there.

  Oddly the Austalian was a Ferrari fan and not a Red Bull fan (has an Aussie driver).  I'm sure you can imagine the locals were big on team Ferrari (Scuderia Ferraria).  Here's a picture of their man Fernando Alonso who ended up finishing second after a nice starting move to pass the Australian driver Mark Webber.

  

  That's about all for now, the race and the trip were very long so we were pretty tired after making it in last night.  We'll certainly have more to come but we're both going to be doing some work and catching up on emails during the days this week.