Nurburgring

One of the famous things that was near where we stayed was the Nurburgring. I had never heard of it, until I saw an American commercial for a car that mentioned that it had been tested on the "famous Nurburgring." I had thought they had said "Nuremburg" which is not far from Bamberg, but this place is near the Belgium Border. It is a World Famous race track for formula 1 cars (not Nascars). There are 2 very interesting things that stand out to me about this track. #1 - The track has many turns, and is designed like a road, not a race track, like you normally think of. #2 - What really amazed us was that anyone can pay to ride on the track (we could have even taken our Van on it if we wanted to). The really crazy thing is, you can even race other normal drivers on this crazy course. With the very limited liability in Europe, they allow for you to do this. We read that 3-12 people die each year on the track (not the professionals, but the average joe's that come to try and race). Camden and Mia weren't too interested in it, but Bailey was really intrigued and thought it was fascinating! For a euro each, they allowed us up into the grandstands by ourselves to watch the "average joe's" race - a very interesting experience!

Waiting for the racers to come by

Check that out!

If you don't have your own car (or you don't want to ruin your own car) you can rent a race car too - this car was a rental...

You can barely see the red car, but this was the first hair pin turn - lots of the racers skidded, and we thought for sure we would see a few bad accidents....

When the people first lined, I said to Bryan, "There is no way they are going to let these average people race" - but sure enough, that is exactly what they did! It could have been me in my minivan too :-)

You can barely see the hairpin turn coming, but it was crazy to see these people racing around it!

The cars were all different..some were race cars, some were small normal cars, some were rental cars, some were new, and some were quite a bit older....

This is the map of what the track looks like...

When we were pulling out of the parking lot, this tractor trailer was blocking us (we were one of only a handful of people there, so they must not have realized we would need to get out). The Maserati company must have been bringing in cars to test for time on the track.