day 2: speedway museum, baseball and some surprises
We awoke on our first full day in Indianapolis with a plan. Our first excursion was to the newly refurbished Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum. We hoped to sign up for a tour of the track. Unfortunately, there would be no tours that day. But the museum was wonderful.
Favorite things for Warren were taking huge foam pieces and putting them together into a race car and a computer game where you act as chief mechanic for a racer, making decisions during a race on adjustments to a car. He worked at that one through multiple races until he figured out how to bring his car into first place using projected percentages of outcomes. Math whiz!
Always a lover of a good trophy, he enjoyed seeing the Borg-Warner and the process that is used to fashion the faces of each winning driver on that trophy. My favorite part of the tour was the Starting Line Experience, with a fully immersive film of what the morning of a race is like leading up to the waving of the green flag. It was thrilling to “experience” the flyover of the Blue Angels, to see the cars move around the track in formation and feel like you are there in their midst. Thrilling, and maybe a little bit scary.
After the museum and a stop for lunch we celebrated the beautiful day by going to my favorite cemetery and visiting my parents and grandparents. Warren is named after my maternal grandparents, Mary B. and George E. Warren, whose last name became our daughter’s middle name. I had brought books about each relative whose final resting place is in Crown Hill, and I showed Warren photos of each one and told their stories. Warren thought the mausoleum was a little creepy, but he really enjoyed the last stop in the cemetery where we visited the highest spot of land in Indianapolis, the final resting place of beloved Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley. We dropped coins on his grave for the children’s hospital that bears his name and I performed a dramatic reading of his most famous poem, “Little Orphant Annie.” Warren thought that was really cool. And I love that the acme of the cemetery isn’t devoted to a politician but a writer.
Our day was going so well and we were so efficient with our time that we decided to make a surprise detour to an amazing Lego shop that buys and sells used Lego kits. There are bins and shelves full of every conceivable Lego piece including a bin of only heads. We saw one kit in the shop priced at $7000!
That night we had tickets to watch the Indianapolis Indians Minor League team play the Gwinnet Stripers. Our seats were right behind the Stripers’ dugout along the first base line. Warren’s favorite position to play is first base, so he watched with intense enthusiasm. But he was disappointed that every foul ball went several rows behind us. After the final inning was complete, Dave crawled across the top of the dugout and retrieved a ball that had been sitting just on the other side of the protective net. Warren’s grin could have lit Dodger Stadium!
Crawling into bed, Warren exclaimed that this was the best day ever!
Love, Liz
