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Chicago, Illinois
You got a fast car, I want a ticket to anywhere
We are starting the 1999 Weekend Trips Slideshow in August in Chicago, where the city is hosting Cows on Parade, an art project consisting of cows (fake cows, not real cows) on parade (not really parading, just kind of standing there.
If you look up, you can see even more cows, or perhaps a golden calf to worship.
Cows on Parade sounds like a dumb idea, but in reality it was a dumb but fun idea. Each of the fiberglass cows is painted or designed differently, and spotting them throughout the city was great fun.
I don’t need a reason to go to Chicago (i really, really don’t), but this time I had one. This is the Chicago Motor Speedway, home to the first ever Target Grand Prix of Chicago Presented by Energizer, a name that just rolls of your tongue. The cars racing are the open wheel IndyCars, but due to a dumb corporate fight, they’re now called the CART FedEx Championship Series, another dumb name. The race was fun and won by Juan Pablo Montoya of Chip Ganassi Racing, and the seats in the hot August sun were shaded. Good times all around.
If this track looks a little too rural for Chicago, that’s because the Target Grand Prix of Chicago Presented by Energizer wasn’t the only CART FedEx Championship Series race that I attended in 1999. This is the far more local Nazareth Speedway, home to the Bosch Spark Plug Grand Prix.
Not only did we attend the Bosch Spark Plug Grand Prix race at Nazareth, we also had pit passes that allow you to take a creepy tunnel under the track and spend some time in places you’re not quite sure you belong. You also have chances to see drivers up close, like Canadian driver Paul Tracy, who here is cordially signing some guy’s cooler with a green sharpie.
Meanwhile driver Christian Fittipaldi looks like he’d be ok signing coolers and is probably sad while wondering why all the guys with coolers are asking Paul Tracy to sign them and not him.
The races are interesting but can get redundant, on an oval track it’s left turn, left turn, left turn, repeat, and often when something interesting happens you’re dependent on people in the crows with radios to tell you what’s going on. Still, it is fun to be there and a nightmare to leave (about 50,000 cars all need to merge into one lane on a local road to go home), so its sometimes best to enjoy it, and maybe to hang around and not rush out to get caught in all that traffic.
