Oh, the Humanity!

Dirty, densely populated, with inadequate resources, some displays of shocking behavior, and plenty of excitement — sounds like a city, doesn’t it? The Indianapolis 500 really is a daylong pop-up city, and the guesstimated attendance of half a million makes it a much, much larger one than Cincinnati.

Above, $20 lawn parking across the street from the entrance to the track. [The residents of the town of Speedway really rake it in on this one day.] Below, $5 parking on a church lawn a little further away:

Bringing in the cornhole:

This is how we rolled:

Vintage B-25 bombers:

This is about as much as one can see from the infield:

We got to sleep in until 6am because our dedicated friends got up at 4am in order to get their cars and all their gear into the infield:

Here’s a mere sliver of the line to the ladies’ room. This year, my friends and I chose to pee in the grass, between cars. If you think that’s disgusting, consider that we avoided the puke-filled troughs of the restroom facilities:

We put all of our trash into our own trash bags but, in the grand scheme of things, it really didn’t make an iota of difference:

Here is the special ticket stub receptacle area:

Sometime after the fall of Western civilization, people will look back at this day, “the greatest spectacle in racing,” and realize that the signs were there.