A couple of weeks ago (April 18-20), I went to the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach.  Back in December, my mom got us (herself, my dad, and myself) 3-day passes for the event for my birthday, which was April 19.  It was both a Christmas present and a birthday present for me.  At the last minute, we decided to go on Thursday, April 17 in the afternoon after my dad and I got off work (my mom was off work that day).  Our original plan was to leave Friday (April 18) morning and come home on Monday (April 21).  Going by the original plan, I took vacation days from work that Friday and Monday.  My mom used www.hotels.com to book a reservation at a small hotel called the Guesthouse Inn on the Pacific Coast Highway (Hwy 1/PCH).  Here's a list of all the different racing series' that were in Long Beach for the weekend:  Champ Car World Series/IRL (the final split race in the newly-merged series which is now the IRL/IndyCar Series), the American Le Mans Series, the Atlantic Series (the feeder series for the Champ Cars), Formula Drift (drifting cars, which have only rear-wheel drive-like what you see in the movie The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift-a movie I haven't seen.  I saw just a little bit of the drifting at Long Beach), and the Speed GT World Challenge (I didn't see any action from this series).

We got to the Guesthouse Inn at around 5 pm after over 3 hours of driving (traffic on I-405 was only moving about 30 mph from the southern base of Beverly Hills all the way to the Carson area.  We checked in and looked at the room.  The room was clean, but smelled funny, so we decided not to stay there.  We got in the car and looked for a place to eat.

After what seemed like at least an hour, we found a nice shopping center in Hunington Beach called the Bella Terra.  In there was a The Cheesecake Factory restaurant.  We ate there (the food and dessert were great) and then hopped back in the car to find another hotel to stay at.  We soon found the Hampton Inn on Seal Beach Blvd. between the PCH and I-405.  We got a room for three nights here.  It's a nicer hotel than the other one we went to when we arrived.  We unpacked and relaxed and finally went to sleep.

We woke up on Friday morning and got ready and ate breakfast at the hotel.  After that, we went down to Alimitos Bay to try to catch a boat called the Aqualink to get to the race course without messing with the traffic and dealing with parking fees (it was free to park in the marina's parking lot at Alimitos Bay).  But, it turns out the boat wasn't running, so we tried to wait for a bus (called the Passport) at a nearby bus stop.  We met a nice man who was also waiting (he had done so for almost an hour) to take the bus to the race course.  He told us about another bus (the Long Beach Transit).  We took his advice, went to another bus stop just up the road, parked, and boarded a Long Beach Transit bus.  The man gave us earplugs (unused, thankfully) because we didn't have any.

After paying the 90 cent/person bus fare ($2.70 for the three of us), we had to wait on the bus for approximately 10 minutes.  The bus driver was very nice to us.  I was a bit anxious because I hadn't ridden a bus of any kind in over 7 years and had never ridden a transit bus.  It took about a half an hour to get down to the main entrance of the race course at Long Beach Blvd and Ocean Blvd. 

As soon as I stepped off the bus, I could hear the Champ Cars as they zoomed down the backstretch, which is right below Ocean Blvd between the street and the Long Beach Arena.  Friday was all about practice and qualifying; no actual races were held until Saturday.  It was a pretty long walk from the entrance to our seat in Granstand 27 along Shoreline Dr between the hairpin turn and the start/finish line.  Along the way, I picked up a media guide/suvenir program for $10 (the proceeds went to a youth ministry in Long Beach).  After sitting down for a while, I walked around to check out the festivities.

At 4:00 pm Friday, it was time to for me to go to the Champ Car garage area.  Earlier in the day, I bought a 1-day garage pass for $20.  From 4-5pm they had an autograph/photo session in which all the Champ Car drivers signed autographs and took photos with the fans.  I didn't get all the drivers' autographs because some of the lines were so long (like the ones for legendary driver Jimmy Vasser and rookie driver Graham Rahal) and the session was only an hour long.  I stayed at the track all day and ended up with a nasty sunburn on my face and arms because I forgot the sunblock.  And I learned how expensive it was for food and suvenirs at the track.  On Friday alone, I spent over $80 just on food, a program, and the garage pass.

After the autograph session, I called my mom and she came and picked me up.  We went to The Cheesecake Factory (the same one we went to the night before, only this time my sister joined us after arriving from Thousand Oaks, where she lives).  This time I tried the Chicken Teriyaki, which was pretty good.  After dinner, we went back to the hotel (my sister spent the night with us).  As everyone else was falling asleep and my sister was down in the hotel lobby writing work schedules (she manages a Jamba Juice store in the Simi Valley area), I turned the TV to ESPN2 to watch the IndyCar race, which was in Motegi, Japan, only to find that that race was (eventually) postponed until the next day because of rain.  So, I just played cards against myself and eventually went to sleep on the fold-out bed on the couch in the room.

Well that's about it for part 1.  Part 2 (Saturday) coming soon this week!