Grand Tetons

The iconic image of a Grand Tetons vacation, at least its public face. Really the image could as easily be the thousand or so people packed in 350 campsites along the Gros Ventre (Big Belly) river, many of them in RV cocoons to make sure nature doesn't intrude too far: a sort of industrialized recreation. Last year we'd camped up the river in a National Forest campsite, quiet and pleasant, but a bit far from the fleshpots of the visitor center etcetera. This year we'd planned to spend most of the time in a backcountry canoe-in campsite, consequently resigned ourselves to mass camping for a couple of nights. It was endurable but not really what we'd driven eight hours for.


In the evening we walked the two hundred yards down to the river itself, where the moose and her child grazed on the willows. The blurry mess of this image is because light was low and my tripod safely home in the closet. I fished a bit but only small fish attempted to drown the big dry fly. The boys threw rocks to encourage the fish while a beaver fled the scene with alarmed tail-whacks on the water.

The vacation fell plop in the middle of what should have been the heaviest training weeks for my competitive swansong, ITU championships in Budapest. In the grotesquely early morning, face grey as the dawn, up and off again on the bike for ninety minutes, followed by forty minutes' worth of distance run. Sunrise on the Tetons was a fine distraction.

Time for the gear-fussing, loading the canoe with surprising quantities of food and variegated sorts of equipment. The put-in is at String lake, a couple of miles up against the current (in a lake ?) then a short portage. 'Portage' means unpack all the gear so recently packed, hump it up and over the ridge to the next lake, and.. pack it all again. Whee.

At least the scenery was gorgeous. As can be clearly seen here, where I used to have abs there is now a small comfortable puppy of fat. I suppose I'll have to drag it along with me wherever I go now that it's followed me home.

On the way up String lake, there was a young grizzly at the water's edge having a drink. We looked at each other and he faded back into the woods. This was about a mile from the portage, so we hoped nothing in our foodstuffs was smelling too irresistible. The swimming in Leigh lake was good.

The lake was perfectly calm, clear water turning black in the depths, as we cruised in to camp. The site was up a little hill deep in old-growth spruce, willow fringing a small stream delta of sand and rocks below. I hugged two of the big ancient trees, using for excuse the installation of a hammock.

Ian had just returned from a week-long Scout camp where he'd earned his canoe merit badge. He'd paddled bow in Ken's boat on the way in. I asked how it went, "it was very tiring, if I stopped paddling Ken would stop too" whereas sucker Dad just keeps paddling if his crew gets lazy. Hm takes notes.


Ian cruised the lake with his fly rod, but the fish were sparse and cautious in the clear cool water. From the edge of the stream delta, the water dropped straight down to twenty feet or more. It was the first time I've been able to dive off a beach.

We did get a couple of fish, a smattering of smaller brook trout and two big cutthroat, both around 20-21". Ian broke off one of these on the spinning rod, and I lost another on the fly rod, since some fool thought he could fish a big streamer on 5x tippet. The one landed came to a Peter Ross, an old Scottish loch fly pattern I tied thirty years ago in the sun room of the house in Newlands Avenue.


The next day we paddled to the north end of the lake for a change of scenery. This beach had huge prowling cutthroat, they'd come in and snoop through the shallows looking for a little something to eat, like an innocuous version of sharks.

There was a small cabin here, with a ranger lady and her daughter living in it for the summer. They came around the campsites each day to make sure there weren't any bear incidents or drunken campers. The day we paddled out, they came out as well - for a change from living in a log cabin in the woods, they were going backpacking. I thought I was a hardcore outdoor enthusiast.

C got a plump healthy cutthroat on the way back, the only small cutt we saw in the lake. Down in those black depths are shoals of aliens, giant lake trout mistakenly transplanted from northern lakes, which push the cutts down a link in the food chain.

That night another moose and her child tried to take a shortcut through camp, then decided against it and swam around us instead. I nearly had a heart attack, quietly washing the dishes in the dusk, when her large brown head came quizzically around the tree: thought it was the bear, come to see if we had left any of that delicious-smelling dinner sausage for him.

Ian went back to the inlet, where we'd caught most of our fish, to see if there was anything doing. A steep creek runs in a flume from the high country to vanish into the lake here. The winds blow hot from the far shore, then a gust down the ravine brings icy air.
They allow only two nights in the backcountry per permit, so we had to get out again. I abandoned my family in another industrial campsite, fenced about by RVs, while Ken and I headed in to the deepest backest country we could find via 4wd road, in between Grand Tetons and Yellowstone. H assured me they wouldn't spend any time in the campsite except for sleeping, straight to the Jackson Lake Lodge deck.

We found our way down to Lake of the Woods and camped on the east shore in clouds of mosquitoes. A couple of recent graduates of UW (Criminal Justice) were hanging out in their campsite, heavily armed. Ken discussed large handguns with them for a bit. We proceeded peaceably out on the water, where a few fat strong rainbows rose in the evening mists. Strange streams with no apparent drainage area came in from the dark woods, edged by flowers and pebbles.

Wait, mists ? that was smoke from the Boy Scout camp at the other end.. with a merry clangour of Grumman aluminum, they emerged from the smoke like a kind of apocalypse. So much for peace and quiet. In the morning they were up before dawn to regale us with the Scouting Symphony, full Grumman timpani. We left.

The road runs on from the dense woods, through ponderosa parks, into the small well-watered Winegar wilderness. At first we overshot it to come out to a view of Idaho farming country. It looked perfect, an ideal landscape of rolling hills interspersed with clumps of trees around the farmhouses, a sort of middle-earth Shire. That wasn't what we were after, at all, so u-turned back into the wild. Parked at Loon Lake for a lookaround, there they were, two loons happily nested on it. The sewage truck that had been tailing us came in, looped around the campsite, and left again. No idea at all what it was up to.

The Winegar wilderness is there for the bears: as that author notes "a wet, boggy, ponded, willow country, an excellent place to stash a body". We hiked in to the Falls river, bear spray on one hip, .44 magnum on the other (Ken that was, I was insufficiently armed). A pretty river in meanders with very little holding water, below that big sky. The fish were mostly small. Ken got the big one, a 12" brookie out of an undercut bank.

There was a whole passel of fish lined up along the current break, requiring a long exact cast and careful mending of the line to deceive them. After taking half-a-dozen, Ken had pity on me, and let me have the last two in the line. We bushwhacked back across the bear logs and bogs through the spookily quiet empty country.

I wasn't ready to stop fishing and prevailed upon Ken to stop at Grassy Lake, a reservoir drawn down for the fall, with an unattractive bathtub ring of greasy mud and rocks. Pitching out a big streamer quickly got a handsome colourful cutt of 16-17", then nothing.

The original plan was to wander back home camping at various spots on the way, but Ian had been out for over two weeks and wanted a bit of quality time with his Xb0x before school started. That seemed fair after all.

We spent one night in Thermopolis at a hotel with a side excursion to the hot springs. The hotel owner was an enthusiastic hunter, filled the place up with dead heads and antlers. He'd started catch-and-release elephant hunting - shoot the poor beast with a drugged dart, pose for photo, then let it go again. We recede from the real world at an accelerating rate.

Budapest - a memory of racing

The airline of course knocked all the carefully-laid plans into a cocked hat. I had 2 hours to make a connection at Heathrow, and the plane left Denver 2 hours late. Perfect. Another triathlete and I spotted one another in the rebooking queue, so at least the remaining journey wasn't a solo feat of endurance. How to spot a triathlete: the compression socks are a bit of a giveaway; also the only tanned gaunt people are usually endurance athletes of some kind, thus recognizable as kindred spirits. There are lots of gaunt grey businessmen, plump grey also, tanned plump tourists, but we bored them all with discussions of tri arcana. Charles is half my age and twice my speed.


In the Frankfurt airport we hiked well past the smoking areas (the smoke doesn't know to stay in its assigned area) to find something to eat. Here they have small folding bikes to get around the terminal - we discussed renting a couple to get in some training, intervals from corner to corner. Malev Air took us safely to Ferihegi airport where we found they'd contrived to bring my bike but lose Charles'. Midnight on the road and rain.

Next morning, dragged out to breakfast in the hotel for want of the energy to go out and find a better one. The penetrating drone of the Lesser American Bore rose above the murmur of conversation, "soon, I came to dominate my age-group". Boy howdy.

Blaha Luzja metro/tram/bus station is right next to the hotel. The grumpy lady at the metro ticket office sold a three-day pass for all forms of public transport, 3850 forint or about $16. Bargain. The whole complex is underground below a number of streets which provided a navigational challenge, six exits with forks on each one. A fast-motion video of me trying to find the correct tram platform would have looked like whack-a-mole, head popping up at all possible corners of the intersection. Apparently my sense of direction completely abandons me underground.

This is by the transition area. The Danube looks more like the great grey-green greasy Limpopo of my youth than its blue self. Perhaps the blue is upstream, where the waltzing is: or perhaps the blue is up a different river of time: up beyond any travelling, and only flotsam comes down to tell its obscure histories. The rain pelted heartily upon us all. On the tram back again, a young Hungarian couple were speaking English to each other, with careful and delicate accents. Even though they were talking about company websites, it was like listening to dancing. I on the other hand could make no headway at all with Hungarian. Smatterings of German, French, and Afrikaans were of no use, the spiky mouthfuls of consonants and strangely accented vowels would not yield.

The rest of the day went by in bike tinkering, team meetings where they confused us totally about the run course, and a bit of food shopping. I was too tired to attempt anything interesting in the evening, passed out early, rather a waste.


A pair of sphinxes guard the Opera House. She appears to have some prey clasped in her front claws, but I couldn't tell what it was. Across the street, breakfast at the Művész Kávéház was very pleasant - omelette with paprika and mushrooms, fresh bread and a couple of coffees, for half the price of a dull hotel breakfast.












I took out my favorite Waterman pen and pretended to be composing a poem on the back of an itinerary (actually I was writing notes for this blog post, how bathetic). The pen surely marked me as a poser, the attempted poetry even more so. The romantic definition of the origin of poetry is emotion recollected in tranquillity. All I had was the tranquillity, did not want to ruin the hard-won moment with memories. The TV in the corner was playing music videos not so much suggestive as frankly vulgar, so I looked at the Andrassy Ut in the rain instead.

On an ordinary day I'd have walked the mile or two to Szechenyi baths. Sparing my frail old legs for racing, I instead caught the sweetest little metro from the Opera station. This was the first underground railway in Europe, built in 1898. The platforms are big enough for maybe 60 people, with handsome tiling, woodwork and brass. In contrast to the aboveground tram lines where changing lines requires going under the streets, here it was necessary to cross the street to get to the other line: which has a peculiar symmetry.


The entrance to the baths, "And the steam comes out of the grill / Like the whole goddamn town's ready to blow..."
I thought the horses and riders on the upper corners were just your basic St George with Dragon, but closer inspection showed that either the horse or the monster being impaled, has a fish's tail. That added a nicely surrealistic note.




All this useless beauty. No pictures from the baths themselves, unfortunately, as rain stopped play. The entrances, exits, lockers etc are electronically mediated with a bracelet purchased at the entrance. I wandered around confusedly until a kind Hungarian gentleman showed me the tricks. It was a good cold day for warm baths. The bathers displayed that fine European heedless unconcern with physical appearance. This was something of a relief after all the meticulously honed tri bodies, the more so since my own erstwhile hard-edged finely tuned tri body is in a sad state of flab: still that unconcern tends to lead to a series of unfortunate Speedos.

Back on the metro to Oktogon and thus to hotel.



This is the alley not taken, just by the hotel entrance, a sort of urban canyon which I did not have time to explore. Another sight I did not see is Memento Park, a collection of gigantist Soviet statuary, including Stalin's boots. As the Budapest Guide in our race package said, "several hundred tons of Communist fun!" though really it's a tragicomedy like life. The boots are all that's left of the monstrous statue that used to dominate the square, after the revolution toppled it. There was a post on Poemas del rio Wang about being a child in the square at the time of the revolution, but I can no longer find it. I still wanted to reference the Poemas weblog, as Giovanni observes, it is art that could not happen in another medium: try doing that on Facebook or Twitter, or indeed in any 'old' media.

It was time to join the bike ride from the hotel down to the transition area, three miles of congested city-center traffic. As we assembled in the foyer, bemused wedding reception guests fought through the clots of cyclists and machinery.


The ride itself was a unique experience of dodging cars and buses on a tri bike. The real Budapest bike riders pushed impatiently past our group, one with a small pink-clad girl on his bars. Coach Kris did an excellent job of herding us all safely down to the river. For the first time on this trip, it wasn't actually raining, just gloomily lowering. As we racked the bikes the u23 elite race was starting.


Tram back to the hotel yet again, talked to Duncan on the way. Last night he'd eaten at Klassz restaurant, where I planned to go this night. The attraction was their extensive list of wines by the glass - I wanted to try both a Bikavér and one of the famous Tokaj dessert wines. Fine dining the night before a race probably isn't optimal, but then nothing about this race preparation had been optimal. Duncan's brother runs a Hungarian winery and was presenting his wines at the Budapest Wine Festival the next day. He kindly invited me to come along with him and his parents to the festival after the race, which I looked forward to most happily.

Klassz was excellent and I can recommend it to any traveller. I showed up like an American at a ludicrously early hour, but at least there were plenty of open tables. Lamb knuckle with ratatouille and a glass of Takler Bikaver Reserve 2006, followed by an île flottante with Oremus Cuvee Tokaj-Hegyalja 2006. Beautiful. Home in a mellow gastronome'd daze, to pack bags and breakfast for the race.

The wedding guests had their revenge with a continuous thunder of drums from the band reverberating through my room until 2am. I took refuge from this aural equivalent of war in a usual solace, the Mass in B Minor, losing the aches in that cathedral of polyphony.

Morning and the five alarms set plus the wake-up call were all wholly unnecessary. Trams and trains and a bridge walk to the race site, with a New Zealand couple to talk with. Talking about Colorado, I'd preferred cross-country to downhill skiing, which provoked a story. Two years ago he was home on New Year's Eve, resting up for a qualifying race and pathetically reading tri magazines instead of partying. Three lines of small print advertised a South Pole trip. Last New Year's he was at the Pole after fifty-three days of skiing.

We went our ways to the bike racks to putter with pre-race necessities. I'd been working hard on replacing ambition with a calm acceptance and had nearly achieved resignation.


Usually I can swim towards the front of the pack and stay in clear water. At Worlds I'm firmly middle of the pack where it is as Chuckie V says, more like open water mixed martial arts. Some guy kept punching my calf ? a judicious half stroke followed by hard kicking discouraged him. Out of the water in 24 minutes, respectable but not enough.

The transition area was mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.


The bike course was 3 laps, with each wave of age group starting at 15 minute intervals. This meant a crowded course and great difficulty in avoiding drafting, which was a little frustrating. I'd expected to ride about 21 min/lap - recorded a strong 17 minutes on the first lap. The course was short by about 3 miles, unexpected at a world championship, though it assured us all of personal best times.

The run took off down the Danube. I felt good but was getting passed a lot more than seemed right.


I'd written HURT on my forearm, in the place where goal splits for each kilometer of the run would have been written, in the days of actual racing. When young, racing, and starting to hurt, I took it as a challenge: now it's just more pain that I'd rather not deal with. The HURT was both to remind me that racing is supposed to; and to set the only realistically achievable goal for this effort. An honest effort is all the ambition I had left.



I'm thinking about the lions.. what happened to the lions ?


The run course was marvellous: over the Chain Bridge, along the cobbles past St. Stephen's Basilica, then another loop. In the end I'd thrown everything I had into it, improving on my 2006 placing in Lausanne by a whole one place. That wasn't the plan, but all I had this year.

The finish was some miles upstream of the transition area. The organizers provided a boat ride on the Danube to take us back. Walked the bike back to the hotel, as I did not have the stomach to ride on the road. After a couple of hours of washing mud off gear and disassembling the bike to pack it again, the sleepless night brought me low. Duncan called about the wine festival but I'd reached exhaustion, a pity.

All but one of the race pictures are from the ITU gallery. The other is from a Slowtwitch post on Facebook - visit it soon, before it vanishes in the shifting sands of that unreliable site. There's also video from the ITU of the race. I'm in one of the green caps swim wave, but scarcely identifiable. The pictures below by Miklós Tamási and Krisztián Ungváry, via Poemas.

Update February 2011: Poemas leads us to the time machine, emerging dazed in the aftermath of the siege of Budapest, 1944-5. All the bridges were down. Here is the wreckage of the lions with a background of ruins.


On the corner of Blaha Luzja Ter, the actors of the National Theatre clear away its rubble.


At the outlet of the Szechenyi Baths, it's laundry day.


Perfectly astonishing.

To go back before the war, I can recommend Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water. This casts a roseate hue on the landscape, still it places the country clearly in its historical context, with yet more heartbreaking memories. This is the second volume of a promised trilogy. Rumour has it the third is a pile of notes on Sir Patrick's desk. He turned 96 just a few days ago, so we will continue to hope in anticipation.

Update 2019: Hungary has fallen. Fidesz and Orban have created a neo-fascist state.

"Four million people live below the poverty line and one million are in extreme poverty – in a country of fewer than 10 million. Doctors and nurses have been leaving hospitals in droves and the most recent cancer treatment medications are officially denied to people above the age of 75. The economy has been in steady decline since 2008, unemployment is masked by community work programs that pay about half the minimal wage – and which are compulsory for job seekers or those seeking unemployment benefits – and homelessness has been made a crime. Poverty is as palpable on the streets of Budapest as it was in the early 1990s, and the €87 million provided weekly by the EU is channeled with no monitoring almost directly into the pockets of four or five oligarchs loyal to Orbán.

On Oct. 1, 2018, Fidesz changed the law regulating demonstrations such that a meeting of two individuals counts as a political gathering, just as it did under communism. Second, several opposition politicians are under investigation after they attempted to exercise their right to enter public TV premises in December to demand extra airtime for five political demands – beyond the five minutes they got during the 2018 election campaign. Third, the government is silently preparing to establish a set of courts under its direct control for cases concerning the state, a move that would essentially mean the end of the separation of powers."

South Africa in its apartheid days had a similar law for 'political gatherings'. It always struck me as odd that the governing apparatus of Russian communism and apartheid were so similar, given that we were supposed to be deadly enemies of the Russians.
Christ only knows..
For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.

river ragamuffin

 Here we are, embarking upon another North Platte trip. Although this looks like the aftermath of a bad night in the sleeping bag, it is in fact C's usual appearance (Me: "your hair is a ferocious mess. You look like a wild animal !" C: "Thank you").

We've done this trip in many configurations: me alone, me and H together but in solo boats, H in tandem boat with a girlfriend, all four of us in the mighty Penobscot 186, me and one boy or another. This time Ian was at church camp in northern New Mexico, so it was C's turn to see the water from the front of the tandem canoe.

C nearly died of boredom while waiting for the shuttle, which takes about two hours. I fished quietly within view of the grumpy child, breaking off from time to time to feed him or otherwise ameliorate the tedium. The river was as always generous with its fish, first a plump but startled-looking cuttbow then a pretty red-spotted brown. The brown is a lot smaller than I remember it being.

Is this a Dagger I see before me, its handle toward my hand ? Indeed it is and we caper merrily into the eddy, dragging the Clorox baler for extra turning power.

Lunch in the canyon, below the biggest wave on the river, hidden behind the rocks from this angle. The water was relatively low and warm as we were a bit later than usual this year. On the planned weekend, there were storms, snow, and 5600 cfs: two feet of water running strong through the campgrounds. Wyoming Fish & Game actually closed the river. Ken postponed the trip to the beginning of July when the torrents of spring and the snowbanks had receded.

A blessedly uneventful paddle down to Deadwater South camp. The pumpkin-orange tent is my latest new tent, a Marmot Titan 3-man, rather more colourful than I'd prefer but the price was irresistible. It took me a while to figure it out, but the reason the two-man tents these days are so light is because they're not really big enough for two. While the MSR Zoid 2 is a fine weatherly tent, it's rather like sleeping in a coffin. I confess to a bit of a tent fetish, but buying all these tents does allow me a rich fantasy life where I get to use them all.

Water so warm in fact, that swimming and beach play were possible. Peter's canoe serves as an impromptu drying rack after a regrettable incident with a broadsided rock lurking in the flow. It took us ten minutes to pump the boat dry, and some of the dry bags weren't.

I investigated the river attentively, with a trout fly as a sort of virtual periscope into the brown waters. In past years the micro-eddies along this stretch in front of camp held numbers of trout, this time only a smattering of smaller fish. Small is of course a relative term (once wandering down a rivulet high in the Smoky Mountains, I caught a 9" brook trout that was an absolute monster) and comparisons are invidious, I was quite happy to see their bright sides anyway.

Having failed to solve the fish/river daily conundrum, back to camp where C was reading and snacking. There was a large stonefly pattern lost in the weeds by my chair, a huge black fly with an orange wedge of foam as an eyecatcher. I took the hint, lashed it to a strong leader, and went upstream to the black deep water curling and folding around itself in the hole below the rapids. It looked quite implausible, this monster fly floating about, but a splashy little rise turned into a long run deep into the rocks where the leader parted. No more stonefly patterns in my box, a Chernobyl Ant did not produce. C hiked up the riverside trail in the dusk to tell me it was time to start cooking dinner, which it was of course. With a guilty start I complied.

Here we are beneath the cathedral of trees. Canoe tripping tends to gather congeries of mild-mannered eccentrics. The upside is they all have good stories to tell.

C headed off into the woods with the potty shovel, quoting from Up: "I've always wanted to do this ! .... ... so do you dig the hole before or after ?"

Next day time for the Douglas Creek rapid, not particularly formidable at this water level though. Here's everyone lined up for the run, then Roger and Peter coming through.

Ken and I ran heedlessly down ahead of everyone else, to stop and set up rescue ropes just in case. C enjoyed the rapid too - they are his favorite part, probably because he's never yet had to swim one. I'm trying to hold off on giving him that experience. As you can see, it was all a happy blur as we crashed through the waves.

The rescue setup gave me time for a bit of nature-boy contemplation in the undergrowth among small wild roses.

We all agreed the forecast had been for calm sunny weather all three days, but it clouded up quickly and stayed grey all day. Once out of the wilderness area, there was a near-crowd of rafts and driftboats going down in pursuit of trout. After lunch C started to fish and quickly hooked and landed a nice 15" brown in front of several fishless driftboats. A thunderstorm gathered above us, clear blue skies at the horizons but grim lowering cloud above. It rained, thundered, and then hailed for a while. The hail was quite impressive, flattening the riffles while also raising white gouts of water. Once in camp it was wet cold and nasty, so the bonfire was required again. Once C had dried out and warmed up a bit, he told me "Dad you know I didn't enjoy that part".

Luckily there were some good climbing rocks available for entertainment.

I left C carefully drying his feet in the tent, bolted for the water to get in a cast or so. There was a small storm of pale yellow mayfly and caddis blowing down river, so tried a dry fly and was quickly rewarded with a handsome 15" brown, the match of C's fish from earlier in the day. I took that as my prompt to not neglect my fatherly duties again. Ken went on and caught some excellent fat fish on dry flies from around the island.

We clambered up and among the rocks. It rained off and on all evening. Usually things will dry out overnight in the desiccated Wyoming air, this time it was still sopping wet in the morning, tents, clothes, shoes and all. There's nothing like packing a dry bag full of damp matériel which you know is going to fester in there for another day and night.

The water had grown colder as we went downriver, oddly enough. French Creek came in roaring high with icy green waves breaking into the tiger's eye brown of the main stem. Paddling over near it was like going into air conditioning. A bald eagle watched us go from his dead-tree perch. The high water rushed us down to the takeout.

The Saratoga Hobo Hot Springs were too hot for comfort. C couldn't even get in, and it took me several tries. Usually there's a pool in the river at the outflow where the water mingles with cold river water, but it had been washed away. At Stumpy's Cafe the waitress was a young Goth, didn't expect that in farming country.

Back over the Snowy Mountains still plentifully supplied with snow, even a cornice or two in the highest country. There was a small moose-jam on the road, a big bull up to his knees in a flooded meadow, munching happily while surrounded by cameras. C had fallen asleep ten minutes after leaving Saratoga so we didn't stop.

Some of the pictures are courtesy of Roger. Thank you Roger.

Thanks too to Ken for putting the whole thing together, as every year.

Budapest 2010

As Don Marquis once observed, "I've finally conquered that G-D willpower of mine. Gimme a double Scotch". In my case it was a tax rebate that overcame real and deserved scruples about indulging in a vanity project, to go and race in Budapest. The swim is in a rowing basin next to the Danube, since the river is sick with wastewater at that point. The bike looks to be flat and drafty. The run goes along the river past the castle, then two loops through the old town - should be a fine route. Originally I'd hoped to be somewhat competitive, but at this point it's looking like it will be more a gesture towards the memory of racing than a race in fact. Usually it's a good party though: it will suffice to bring a period to the end of these endeavors.