Nurburgring Trip Day 3

Thursday 15 July 2010 at 3:48 pm

Saturday 10 July
Just bimbling about, really

Mileage start:24643 end:24702 miles travelled:59

Finally a good night's sleep.  Slight blip at 2am when I awoke to what sounded like a hard day at the sawmill.  Luckily my earplugs drowned him out.

Exploring the twisty roads:  The morning was spent first visiting the new Nurburgring complex, which was very impressive but there wasn't much going on.  Plus it was about 40degrees so it was cooler on the move.  Some of the bends scared me a lot, as I'm not the most confident rider - lots of tight hairpins.  In fact a set of double hairpins HERE were dubbed the 'Carway Esses' after a bit of a brown-trousers moment!  And every time it looked like a twisty bit was coming up, Ian would come flying past me at Mach 0.9, all knees & elbows, the frickin' psycho.

We had a trundle up to one of the track viewing areas to look at some of the machinery going past, and it was at this point I finally made up my mind not to ride it.  The speed at which some of those cars came by was staggering, and my thoughts turned to my daughter Molly, who had turned 6 months old the day before... priorities!

German food:  there's a petrol station quite near the track entrance with a nice little cafe next to it, so we stopped for lunch under the shade of their parasols.  I thought I'd try something German, and ended up with currywurst - basically sausage with curry sauce and some chips.  Very cosmopolitan!

All done from memory: John had a stint at leading our group for a while, and he's very anti-satnav.  "Just memorise the routes a section at a time" he says.  He then led us down a blind country track on the pretext that he'd seen a performance car go down there.  Then we went to Hoch Acht (which may or may not be some sort of high point) for a bit more panorama action.

On the way back we stopped off at Adenau bridge, another popular track viewing point.

Traffic spotting: there's no finer sport after a hard day's sweating than sitting in the front garden with a cold beer, playing a game of "which make of bike/car's going to come past next".  The sheer variety of vehicles is amazing - anything from MK1 Cortinas to Opel GTs to a DeTomaso Pantera.  The football was on so we watched Germany come third in some cup thing or other whilst eating steak, taking the piss out of each other and drinking quite a lot of German wheat beer (it's my new favourite).  We also examined some of the 'shiny shiny' things lying around in the hotel, and spent a long time extolling the virtues of a beautifully crafted brand-new piston and a crownwheel & pinion from a diff.  Later on John discovered a medal and presented it to me as the 'Captain Slow' award for the slowest rider.  I accepted it with thanks.

During the late evening there was an incredible electrical storm and quite a lot of rain, but by the morning it had dried off.  Oh, and apparently I snore like a dodgy turbo, complete with wastegate noises.