2011 Canadian Grand Prix

After 7 years of fabulous race weather, this year was somewhat less than fabulous. I have always said rain races are my favourites, but I never wanted to attend one. This year, we did. It started raining an hour before the race, the race started on a sopping wet track in the rain behind the Safety Car, then after about 15 laps they stopped it for 2 hours as the rain got harder and harder -- and we loyal fans just stood in the rain the whole time. The race re-started when the rain stopped, but an hour after the race was over, the monsoon started again. By the end of the day, all 150,000 people at the track were wet as drowned rats.


In the past, I have split these posts up, but this year I whittled my 350 pictures worth keeping into 35 worth sharing that cover the whole weekend. I will put them in order, and keep commentary to a minimum, generally with photo captions only.


First, Friday practice, which is the best place to get "up close & personal" photos. In posting the best photos, I'm not covering all the drivers. Since Michael Schumacher turned a lot of laps on Friday, I got a bunch of shots of him.

Michael Schumacher 

Jerome d'Ambrosio 

Mr. Schumacher again 

Sebastien Buemi

Mr. Buimi, a little closer

Nico Rosberg

Mr. Schumacher photo #3, being chased

Lewis Hamilton chasing Mr. d'Ambrosio 

Vitaly Petrov chasing Kamui Kobyashi

One of the support races is a historical GP race. This is the 1980 Williams once driven by Alan Jones.

Pretty, and pretty historical 

My guy Jarno Trulli

 One of the features of my camera is a multiple exposure mode. I don't have much use for it except here.

Someone from Force India chasing someone from Marussia Virgin 

Reubens Barichello, in his 319th GP 

Mr. Schumacher. Photos of him are getting repetitive 

Lewis Hamilton 

Narain Karthikeyan 

I find it interesting that there are two Lotus teams, both using the same Lotus insignia.

• One, that Jarno Trulli drives for, is called Team Lotus. Their car colour is British Racing Green. They are powered by Renault engines. The drivers wear green.
• The second team is called Lotus Renault. Their car colour is black (after the classic JPS Lotus' of the 1970's and 1980's) but their mechanics wear green. Their logoowear that you can buy calls them "Classic Team Lotus"

Two different Lotus teams leave the pits 

Mark Webber leads a mass pit exit 

To Saturday. The time on the track is less interesting because the drivers have figured the track out and spin out less, plus it's qualifying, and they want to have good clean runs. So we spend more time in our grandstands, and watch a few support races.

Typically crowded Saturday in Grandstand 12

Mr. Webber 

Pastor Maldonado. He didn't have a good race (see below) 

Mass start of the Formula 1600 race, with drivers as young as 15 

Flat spotting the tires

Sunday was monsoon day.

The start behind the pace car 

Why even when going slow, you want to be first 

The pace car leaves. Vettel and Alonso fight for the first corner 

Mr. Hamilton whacks Mr. Webber on the first lap 

Mr. Maldonado on intermediate rain tires 

Paul Di Resta chases Sebastien Buemi 

Weber chases Schumacher as Kobayashi comes out of the pits 

Mr. di Resta spins out, and sits pointing the wrong way, in the way 

Mr. Maldonado hits the wall exiting the pit on cold tires

To this moment, I don't know how Jensen Button managed to be dead f#*&@ing last on lap 30, pit 6 times, get a drive through penalty and still win the race. But he did. The best part of the race was the "who's in 3rd?" three way battle between Webber, Schumacher and Button that went on for about 10 laps.


After the race, we did not run to the podium as we did last year. But we did get to the pit wall to see the cars, up close and personal.

Up close to the Ferrari of Felipe Massa 

A mass of cars at race end scruitineering

We hung out on the track for about an hour then the heavens opened again. We then had to wade through 3" deep rivers of water to find a place to hide from the rain.


There's a great line at the end of Four Weddings and a Funeral, by Carrie standing in the rain:

There comes a point where you can't get any wetter

We were well past that point at least twice on Sunday. As I write this, 3 full days later, my wallet is still wet, as is the inside of my daypack.


But the race was fun.

Escher and the way home from Europe

I mentioned that there was an Escher in Schiphol airport, and there is. But you're not supposed to be able to see it. It's in Lounge 4, which although inside the building, is separated from the rest of the airport by glass walls or mesh. I gather from asking a few people it's because it's easyJet's lounge, and no one seems to like them. Or maybe there's some other reason.


Anyway, if you take the elevator to the 2nd floor, and go WAY to the end, you can see Metamorphosis III. Like the most of Escher's work, it's a print. But this is series of 33 woodcut prints printed onto 6 separate sheets of paper which were then painted by hand. And it's a whopping 48' long.

Really, really big

Detail 1: hand painted ships, birds and fish

Detail 2: Salamanders, of course

It's a real shame it's not in the main part of the airport.


The flight home was uneventful but mostly cloudy, except for parts of Greenland.

Mountains in a sea of ice 

Excellent glacial features 

Fjords. Saw icebergs but didn't get any pictures

Ridin' in the rain to the dunes and bunkers

Only 30 minutes from the Amsterdam Centraal station by hydrofoil ferry...

A screamin' 35 kts

...is the town of IJmuiden, which lies at the entrance to the Noordzee canal, the main shipping channel from the North Sea to Amsterdam. No, I don't know why the I and the J in IJmuiden are capitalized. There's an IJ river, and several other IJ places, too (perhaps Edwin can explain...). While I do find sea ports and monster mega-locks mildly interesting, we went there to visit the Nationaal Park Zuid-Kennemerland. This is a 10 km or so strip of sand dunes that are more or less in their original state.


Now, these are not Oregon "multiple square kilometers of moving sand dunes 150' high" (which I love visiting and going dune jumping on, as my daughter can attest). These dunes are classic depositional dunes that one finds at river mouths. They start with a long sand beach...

A long beach 

In both directions. Note the sand "hills" on the left

...and a linear sand foredune just behind the beach, which is the hill in the above photo. The foredune is held in place by grasses and tends to become fairly stable. Behind this in the swales you get freshwater (or in this case, brackish water) ponds that are linear (thought the park didn't have very many of these).  If the river has been around a long time (like, say, the Rhine), over time, the depositional process repeats, and you build plains of several rows of linear relic foredunes, and that's where the park is and the environment it supposedly protects.

On the top of a relict foredune, some 2 km inland. Ocean in the distance.

Sometimes, the wind scours the grasses off, and you get sand movement, typically parabolic in shape and in the direction of the wind. You can see the wind affected trees in the above photo, so you know it's normally windy here. But there were only two large-ish sand fields contained within the park, and neither is more than a square kilometer in size.

Scouring in the grasses 

This sand field is actually stabilizing

In motion

Also in motion, but the grasses are winning 

Classic aeolian (wind driven) patterns

There are a couple of freshwater lakes in the bigger swales.

Large lake in a larger swale from a relic foredune 3 km inland

This is an interesting national park, though not too "natural". They let cows (Highland cattle) run free in here, and they are very big and have big horns.

Big boy. Or girl. With eye level pointy bits

There are numerous farms and residences inside the park, since the park was only established in 1995. There's even an area where European bison roam free.  And it was a good place to dip my feet in the North Sea.

Cold.

So geologically, it's an interesting park, and it was an interesting place to ride to. However, 90 minutes into our ride, some 14 km from the start and almost at our turn around point, it started to rain. Fortunately, we were near a beach restaurant, so we sat on their covered porch for an hour, picnicking, staying warm (it was only 14°) and dry while it poured. (Note to Formula 1 race fans: Where we stopped was only 2 km north of Zandvoort, the site of the Dutch Grand Prix races held from 1955 to 1985).


Since we had stopped and explored most of the geology, as well as rode most of the way through the park on the way to lunch, we had some time to spare in the afternoon, so rode into IJmuiden's port area, and ran across a group of WW2 German bunkers embedded in the 2nd line of foredunes and a bunker museum (sadly not open).

Interesting rearward facing machine gun pillbox 

KC peers into a sand filled gun emplacement and tunnel access 

Trusty steeds in front of a major bunker access point 

Rows of 2 story big gun bunkers

Crawling around these was interesting, though I was not impressed that graffiti goons seem to think historic sites are good places to deface. Near as I could understand from the interpretive signs, Hitler was convinced the Allies were going to invade the continent somewhere in the Netherlands, and so had monstrous defenses and multiple rows of bunkers built to guard the port.


It was a very nice day trip, and pretty riding. The park has a ton of birds (the downside to biking is the difficulty in stopping to birdwatch). We did about 36 km on heavy 3 speed Amsterdam bikes; it would have been easier with nicer bikes, but you have to rent bikes in Amsterdam and bring them with you, and most places in Amsterdam rent pretty heavy duty bikes by the day.