And with that, I now bring you back to Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007....
Fresh off of our Berlin trip, Eryn and I knew we'd probably be sleeping in the next day. And it turned out to be true. We DID, in fact sleep in. I know, I know - fascinating stuff. Upon awakening, though, we immediately motivated. We made coffee, had a snack, and started up a rousing second game of Twilight Struggle. It was to be a big day indeed. (One of the running jokes of the trip was about how we were such early motivators - out of bed by 5 am, followed by a 60 minute run, etc. , every single day. And funny every time.)
Around 2:30 pm or so, we finally made it out of the house. We went into downtown K-town, and hit up the Brauhaus with our travel guides for some lunch and to map out the last few days of the trip, which at that point were still up in the air. When the surly German (I realize those two words together are starting to sound redundant) waitress heard our order, she paused and gave us a puzzled look. At first it wasn't clear why, but when the food arrived, all was understood. We each ordered a salad and also an entree. Only when the salads arrived, in 14 inch bowls, it became clear that the salads were ALSO entrees. Moments later when the actual entrees arrived, there wasn't even enough room on the table for all four gigantic plates plus drinks. The waitress sported a fairly solid "you guys are idiots" glance in our direction while holding our true entree plates as we hurredly rearranged everything on our table to attempt to make room.
But despite appearing like binge eaters (average Americans), we did manage to map out a gameplan for the rest of Eryn's trip. We paid the bill and headed out.
That night, with no great travel plans on the horizon, we decided to go ahead and do some Go-Kart racing. I had heard from several sources (Pete, Libby, etc) that these Kart races were a lot of fun, and certainly something to see. They were also reported to be borderline unsafe. The Germans, being much less worried about law-suits than we "it couldn't possibly be my fault" Americans, apparently set up a track with uber-Karts where the only limitation on how fast you drive is, as Pete put it, "Your fear of death." Also, there were reports of local Funboys hanging around - guys who did this stuff all the time and brought their own custom Funboy helmets and everything. And best of all, this place apparently had a bar upstairs - thus encouraging drinking and not just driving, but drinking and racing. So naturally we had to check this out.
Sure enough, the attraction did not disappoint. We found the place and walked in to the sounds and visuals of zooming carts going what appeared to be mach 2 around a mini formula-one style track. (At least they appeared to be going mach 2 - but maybe that's just because the last go karts I remembered seeing were the battery powered wussy ones at Family Fun Center.)
Eryn and I went upstairs to inquire about race information. Races are scheduled, and you can pick a 10, 20, or 30 minute race, all for different prices. Not sure on how long of a race to try, we opted for the middle option and got ourselves a starting time for a 20 minute death-match. Along with that, we had to buy these cool Ninja Hoods for a few Euros to go on underneath the helmets for sweat collection. So now we had uber-karts, funboys, ninja hoods, and a bar. We immediately decided that this place rocked.
We waited for our race time and made conversation with some others who were going to be in our race. There were about six or eight others, guys and girls, all appearing to be mid-twenty somethings. We found out that they were all only doing a 10 minute race, so it would be just Eryn and I alone on the track for the latter 10 minutes of our 20 minute race. Now the guys in this group weren't quite Funboys - more like Pseudo Funboys - but once we started driving it became clear they knew what they were doing out there and had been there before.
A few minutes before the start of our race, we went downstairs and got our "rules" briefing. The rules were simple - different colored lights posted around the track and different colored flags meant different things, like caution, or stop, etc. I got the feeling from the Funboy briefing us that the various rules were mostly for show (i.e. he could have cared less), and I was amused to learn that there was one flag, which if waved at you as you drove by, meant something along the lines of, "Get out of the way - you are too slow and someone is trying to pass you - oh and by the way you suck at go-kart racing."
The other chuckle-worthy part of the briefing was how dismissive he was if you wrecked and got stuck on the edge of the track somewhere.
"If you wreck, is best you push yourself out," He explained in accented English. "Otherwise, you raise hand and I have to come over. This takes much time. You are better off getting yourself out."
Translation: Don't bother me unless you're in a fiery crash and may be seriously hurt. Even then, I may or may not actually come over...
After our briefing we got to our respective cars. It turned out that E was in the pole position and I was in the second car. Behind us were all the other drivers. That was probably a mistake. The correct order should have been: 1)Experience Local Pseudo-Funboys first, 2)Eryn and I next, and 3)Timid appearing chicks last. But oh well, it made the race more interesting I guess.
Before long it was time to go and after donning our helmets, fastening our seatbelts, and having our engines started, we were ready to rock. Eryn zoomed out ahead of me and a few seconds later a flagged was waved in my general direction and I was cleared to start as well. The cars all had computer chips on them which functioned as lap-time recorders, so at the end of the race we'd know exactly how fast we'd run every lap - pretty cool. (And thus, given the staggered starts, its not really a race at all in the truest sense - more like a competitive time trial.)
Now the track is sort of hard to describe (see the pictures to glimpse at least part of the track). Most of it was fairly curvy, and there were 2 or 3 legitimate hairpin turns. The middle portion of the track was a large straightaway. This proved to be the most dangerous portion of the drive, because you could slam the gas down here and really open it up. But by the end of the straightaway you realized you were still acclerating and already going at a breakneck pace, and you had to make a hard right. So you'd brake and turn and the cart always felt a little "unstable" to me at this portion of the track. In essence, the straightaway was so dangerous because you could get the MOST speed (you could never get these things to full speed, simply because the track was too curvy) before you had to decide if you wanted to survive the turn (at the expense of losing some of that mind-numbing, euphoric, ludicrous speed, which, I'm telling you, was a tough call on every lap) or not. The critical decision point came when you had to either slow down and be a little safer, or preferred to try and maybe make up an extra split second on your opponent at the possible cost of pitching into a full on roll-over fiery wreck. Either way, I would describe the speeds obtained near the end of that straightaway as "unsafe", at best.
It took a few laps to get the hang of the track, and I think before the second full lap I had already sensed one of the Funboys on my ass and I had to let him pass. My main goal was to keep Eryn in sight, which I did fairly well initially, even getting right up near him, though its hard to tell if that was from my wicked-skilled driving or simply track clutter in front of him. After a few laps people were piled up all over the place and we were all forced to slow down at times. The timid girls especially caused problems with this. (And I'm sure that to the Funboys - Eryn and I were ALSO timid girls of a sort. I was half expecting to hear "Hey Dummkopf, get out of de' VAY - you are SLOW-boy! HAHAHAHAHAHA!" as they neared and ultimately passed me with some techno blaring. Sadly, this didn't happen.)
After ten minutes passed, all the racers save Eryn and I were escorted off to the side, back to their pits, and their race was over. At that point, I felt like my race could EASILY have been over too. These carts had manual steering, and the constant turns at speed had my forearms burning but good. Ten minutes is a LONG time to race. After twenty minutes, I felt like I had spent a weekend rock-climbing.
Eryn was still ahead of me when it went down to two of us, so I set about chasing him down. I started to get close and was feeling good for a bit, but at one crucial point I actually bumped him directly from behind - which slowed me down and sped him up. After that I never caught back up. I may have closed the gap a little, but then he'd widen it again, and so on. All in all, time-wise however, it felt like we had run a pretty even race.
When the twenty minutes were finallyup, we pulled our dragsters into the pits, and got up, forearms absolutely ablaze. We went upstairs and checked the lap sheet. As predicted, we did actually run a very even race lap by lap, with each of us basically splitting the number of laps that we were faster on. We took a few final pics of the place, turned in our helmets, kept our ninja hoods (which we were for the entire rest of the trip), high-fived and took off.
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